The interaction of subsyllabic encoding and stress assignment: A new examination of an old problem in Spanish

Abstract

This study employs a naming task to examine the role of the syllable in speech production, focusing on a lesser-studied aspect of syllabic processing, the interaction of subsyllabic patterns (i.e., syllable phonotactics) and higher-level prosody, in this case, stress assignment in Spanish. Specifically, we examine a controversial debate in Spanish regarding the interaction of syllable weight and stress placement, showing that traditional representations of weight fail to predict the differential modulation of stress placement by rising versus falling diphthongs in Spanish nonce forms. Our results also suggest that the internal structure of the syllable plays a larger role than is assumed in the processing literature in that it modulates higher-level processes such as stress encoding. Our results thus inform the debate regarding syllable weight in Spanish and linguistic theorising more broadly, as well as expand our understanding of the importance of the syllable, and more specifically its internal structure, in modulating word processing.

Keywords:

• Spanish
• Syllable encoding
• Stress encoding
• Phonology

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend thanks to Judy Kroll, John Lipski, Richard Page, and audiences at the Center for Language Science at Penn State and at the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium for input during various stages of this work. We also thank Wendy Rizzo for her invaluable help as a research assistant, as well as associate editor Manuel Carreiras and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which made this a much better paper. All remaining errors and omissions are our own.

The research and writing of this article were supported by NIH R01-HD053146, NSF BCS-0821924, SEJ2007-68024-C02-02/PSIC of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, FEDER funding, and group HUM 883 of the Regional Government of Andalusia, Spain.

Notes

¹The Spanish language exhibits separate stress patterns for verbal and nonverbal forms. The verbal stress system is considerably straightforward and predictable. For our purposes here, we focus on nonverbal stress in Spanish and its ambiguities. For further reading on verbal stress in Spanish, we direct the reader to Harris (1989) and Roca (1990b).

²As an anonymous reviewer points out, we might consider whether the source of the longer latencies evidenced by the diphthong stimuli in the antepenultimate condition is due to the fact that these stimuli contain one grapheme more than the monophthong controls. However, the results discussed here allow us to discard this hypothesis, because, if processing is slowed by the additional grapheme, we should expect to find evidence of this lag in reaction time in the penultimate stress condition as well, which we do not. Given that the two word types pattern together in the phonotactically licit penultimate stress condition, but differently in the theoretically restricted antepenultimate condition, we are left with an explanation that takes into consideration the structure of the syllable above the level of individual segments that comprise it.