This study investigates how French listeners exploit phonological and phonetic cues in segmenting continuous speech into words. We examined how these listeners integrate multiple sources of information not only in lexical identification, using the cross-modal priming paradigm, but also in the storage of new lexical representations, using an artificial language learning task. Results showed that...

Two experiments explore how Korean-speaking L2 learners of English process English lexical stress during spoken word recognition. Korean doesn't employ lexical-level prosodic distinctions like English lexical stress, but it has phrase-level prosodic structure ((T) HLH), with the initial tone determined by the phonation type of phrase-initial sound. Results from eye-tracking and gating experimen...

This study investigates the effect of perceptual training on the learning of non-native lexical stress contrast. Nineteen participants who speak Mandarin or Taiwanese as their native language and have acquired English as a foreign language for an average of 7.2 years attended a perceptual training course to learn to identify English disyllabic nouns and verbs which differ only in the location o...

Lexical stress refers to the opposition of strong and weak syllables within polysyllabic words and is a core feature of the English prosodic system. There are probabilistic cues to lexical stress present in English orthography. For example, most disyllabic English words ending with the letters "-ure" have first-syllable stress (e.g., "pasture", but note words such as "endure"), whereas most end...

Adult speakers of different free stress languages (e.g., English, Spanish) differ both in their sensitivity to lexical stress and in their processing of suprasegmental and vowel quality cues to stress. In a head-turn preference experiment with a familiarization phase, both 8-month-old and 12-month-old English-learning infants discriminated between initial stress and final stress among lists of ...

This Event-Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates the use of prosodic information in the process of lexical access in French. In French, accentuation is said to be post-lexical, with a primary final accent (FA) and secondary initial accent (IA) marking the edges of the phrase. Results from previous studies, however, suggest IA may hold a demarcative function close to the level of the word....

Two experiments explore how Korean-speaking L2 learners of English process English lexical stress during spoken word recognition. Korean doesn't employ lexical-level prosodic distinctions like English lexical stress, but it has phrase-level prosodic structure ((T) HLH), with the initial tone determined by the phonation type of phrase-initial sound. Results from eye-tracking and gating experimen...

Human listeners use lexical stress for word segmentation and disambiguation. We look into using lexical stress for largevocabulary speech recognition for the Dutch language. It appears that beside vowels, consonants should be taken into account. By introducing stressed phonemes, and features for spectral bands and the fundamental frequency, we reduce the word error rate by 2.6 %.