The effect of stress on English word recognition by native speakers of typologically different languages

The study investigates the effect of stress on English word recognition by speakers of lexical tone and lexical pitch accent languages. Two on-line tasks that involved Taiwan Mandarin and Japanese speakers as test subjects and English natives as controls were conducted: (i) a uni-modal lexical decision task and (ii) a cross-modal priming and lexical decision task. It was found that Mandarin and Japanese speakers were accurate in auditorily discerning words and non-words based on stress patterns (e.g., PEOple vs. *peoPLE) insofar as the stressed syllable bore a high tone. This suggests that their representation of stress may be tonal in nature. Besides, Mandarin speakers responded faster when hearing a prime with primary stress and seeing a word with the first syllable stressed. The same was not found in Japanese speakers, suggesting that the use of stress in English word recognition was constrained by native lexical prosody.