How prior experience with pitch accents shapes the perception of word and sentence stress

Listeners perceive high or rising pitch as stressed – at the word and sentence level (high-pitch bias). Since syllables can also be low-pitched, this bias may lead to misinterpretations of stress thus slow down speech comprehension. We investigate effect immediate exposure with high- vs. low-pitched on identification stress. Participants were exposed utterances containing only syllables. In experimental trials, they then heard either trisyllabic words second syllable (Experiment 1) three-word-sentences 2) indicated position word/sentence Stimuli presented in three intonation conditions (high-pitched first, second, third syllable/word). Both experiments endorsed high-pitch bias, an increase after exposure. Our results suggest a speaker-independent re-weighting acoustic cues stress, which is driven by experience.