title: The role of stress and word size in Spanish speech segmentation.
abstract: In English, the predominance of stressed syllables as word onsets aids lexical segmentation in degraded listening conditions. Yet it is unlikely that these findings would readily transfer to languages with differing rhythmic structure. In the current study, the authors seek to examine whether listeners exploit both common word size (syllable number) and stress cues to aid lexical segmentation in Spanish. Forty-seven Spanish-speaking listeners transcribed two-word Spanish phrases in noise. As predicted by the statistical probabilities of Spanish, error analysis revealed that listeners preferred two- and three-syllable words with penultimate stress in their attempts to parse the degraded speech signal. These findings provide insight into the importance of stress in tandem with word size in the segmentation of Spanish words and suggest testable hypotheses for cross-linguistic studies that examine the effects of degraded acoustic cues on lexical segmentation.
authors.affiliation: Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, 975 South Myrtle Avenue, P.O. Box 870102, Tempe, Arizona 85287-0102, USA amy.lacross@asu.edu, julie.liss@asu.edu, beatriz.barragan@asu.edu, amadam13@asu.edu, visar@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: LaCross
authors.affiliation: Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, 975 South Myrtle Avenue, P.O. Box 870102, Tempe, Arizona 85287-0102, USA amy.lacross@asu.edu, julie.liss@asu.edu, beatriz.barragan@asu.edu, amadam13@asu.edu, visar@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liss
authors.affiliation: Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, 975 South Myrtle Avenue, P.O. Box 870102, Tempe, Arizona 85287-0102, USA amy.lacross@asu.edu, julie.liss@asu.edu, beatriz.barragan@asu.edu, amadam13@asu.edu, visar@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Beatriz
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Barragan
authors.affiliation: Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, 975 South Myrtle Avenue, P.O. Box 870102, Tempe, Arizona 85287-0102, USA amy.lacross@asu.edu, julie.liss@asu.edu, beatriz.barragan@asu.edu, amadam13@asu.edu, visar@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Ashley
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Adams
authors.affiliation: Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, 975 South Myrtle Avenue, P.O. Box 870102, Tempe, Arizona 85287-0102, USA amy.lacross@asu.edu, julie.liss@asu.edu, beatriz.barragan@asu.edu, amadam13@asu.edu, visar@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Visar
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Berisha
authors.affiliation: Communication Disorders, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, 8140, New Zealand megan.mcauliffe@canterbury.ac.nz.
authors.forename: Megan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: McAuliffe
authors.affiliation: New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behavior, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, 8140, New Zealand robert.fromont@canterbury.ac.nz.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fromont
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception