title: Perceiving unstressed vowels in foreign-accented English.
abstract: This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect on-line speech comprehension in British speakers of English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /ə/, Dutch speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by suprasegmentals (duration and intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners heard sentences ending in monosyllabic prime fragments--produced by either an English or a Dutch speaker of English--and performed lexical decisions on visual targets. Primes were either stress-matching ("ab" excised from absurd), stress-mismatching ("ab" from absence), or unrelated ("pro" from profound) with respect to the target (e.g., ABSURD). Results showed a priming effect for stress-matching primes only when produced by the English speaker, suggesting that vowel quality is a more important cue to word stress than suprasegmental information. Furthermore, for visual targets with word-initial secondary stress that do not require vowel reduction (e.g., CAMPAIGN), resembling the Dutch way of realizing stress, there was a priming effect for both speakers. Hence, our data suggest that Dutch-accented English is not harder to understand in general, but it is in instances where the language-specific implementation of lexical stress differs across languages.
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, NL-6500AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. bettina.braun@uni-konstanz.de
authors.forename: Bettina
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Braun
authors.forename: Kristin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lemhöfer
authors.forename: Nivedita
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mani
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011930:Reaction Time; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult