The effect of F0 peak-delay on the L1 / L2 perception of English lexical stress

This study investigated the perceptual effect of F0 peakdelay on L1 / L2 perception of English lexical stress. A bisyllabic English non-word ‘nini’ /nInI/ whose F0 was set to reach its peak in the second syllable was embedded in a frame sentence and used as the stimulus of the perceptual experiment. Native English and Japanese speakers were asked to determine lexical stress locations in the experiment. The results showed that in the perception of English lexical stress, delayed F0 peaks which were aligned with the second syllable of the stimulus words perceptually affected Japanese and English groups in the same manner: both groups perceived the delayed F0 peaks as a cue to lexical stress in the first syllable when the peaks were aligned with, or before, the end of /n/ in the second syllable. A supplementary experiment conducted on Japanese speakers confirmed the location of the categorical boundary. These findings are supported by the data provided by previous studies on L1 acoustic analysis and on L1 / L2 perception of intonation.