Consequences of lexical stress on learning an artificial lexicon.
Four experiments examined effects of lexical stress on lexical access for recently learned words. Participants learned artificial lexicons (48 words) containing phonologically similar items and were tested on their knowledge in a 4-alternative forced-choice (4AFC) referent-selection task. Lexical stress differences did not reduce confusions between cohort items: KAdazu and kaDAzeI were confused with one another in a 4AFC task and in gaze fixations as often as BOsapeI and BOsapaI. However, lexical stress did affect the relative likelihood of stress-initial confusions when words were embedded in running nonsense speech. Words with medial stress, regardless of initial vowel quality, were more prone to confusions than words with initial stress. The authors concluded that non-initial stress, particularly when wor segmentation is difficult, may serve as "noise" that alters lexical learning and lexical access.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA. creel@psych.upenn.edu
Sarah C
SC
Creel
Michael K
MK
Tanenhaus
Richard N
RN
Aslin
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning