Monitoring metrical stress in polysyllabic words

Abstract

This study investigated the monitoring of metrical stress information in internally generated speech. In Experiment 1, Dutch participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., KAno “canoe”) than for targets with final stress (e.g., kaNON “cannon”; capital letter indicate stressed syllables). It was demonstrated that monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with trisyllabic picture names. These results are similar to the findings of Wheeldon and Levelt (1995) in a segment monitoring task. The outcome might be interpreted to demonstrate that phonological encoding in speech production is a rightward incremental process. Alternatively, the data might reflect the sequential nature of a perceptual mechanism used to monitor lexical stress.

Acknowledgement

Niels O. Schiller is supported by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and by the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO; grant no. 453-02-006). The authors would like to thank Mart Bles and Christine Firk (both Maastricht University), Suzan Kroezen, Janneke van Elferen, and Anne Jacobs (all Radboud University Nijmegen) for their assistance in running the experiments and the members of the Utterance Encoding group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for helpful discussions.

Notes

¹A phonological (or prosodic) word is not necessarily identical to the syntactic (or grammatical) word because some syntactic words such as pronouns or prepositions, which cannot bear stress themselves, cliticize onto other words forming one phonological word together, e.g., gave+i − > /gϵi.vit/.

²The picture is even more extreme if all bisyllabic noun items are included in the analysis, i.e., also compounds and derivations. In that case, there are 85.8% words with initial stress and 14.2% with final stress (type count). Compounds usually have initial stress in Dutch (e.g., DAK.pan “roof tile”) and suffixes are usually unstressed (e.g., WAAR.heid “truth”, consisting of the adjective morpheme waar “true” and the nominal suffix -heid) such that derived nouns generally also have stress on the first syllable. Again, taking frequency into account, a token count revealed that 66.8% of the bisyllabic nouns in Dutch have initial stress, while 33.2% have final stress showing that some final stress words have a relatively high frequency of occurrence.

³One may argue that extended practice with the experimental stimuli in the naming and self-monitoring parts might be responsible to diminish any differences in identification times for the existing objects across conditions, whereas participants only had very limited experience with the nonsense objects. Therefore, participants might have pressed the YES-button to all pictures they were familiar with and the NO-button to everything else, whether real object or not (i.e., there was no need to identify the objects). To show that this was not the case we refer to an object/non-object identification experiment that was done as a control experiment in another study (Jansma & Schiller, 2004). In that study, participants were once exposed to a set of existing objects and non-objects. (The pictures of objects and non-objects used in the current experiment formed a subset of the materials used in the Jansma and Schiller study.) Participants were then required to make the object/non-object decision, and it turned out that even under circumstances in which participants did not have prior practice with the pictures there was no difference in RTs between pictures corresponding to picture names with first syllable stress and those with second syllable stress (see Jansma & Schiller, 2004, for details).

⁴Again, trisyllabic compounds usually have initial stress in Dutch because stress falls on the first part of the compound (e.g., WOON.ka.mer “living room”) and suffixes are usually also unstressed (e.g., HE.mel.rijk “kingdom of heaven”, consisting of the noun morpheme hemel “heaven” and the nominal suffix-rijk). Again, taking frequency into account, a token count revealed that 42.4% of the trisyllabic nouns in Dutch have initial stress, while 39.3% have pre-final stress, and 18.3% have final stress, showing that many initial stress compounds have a relatively low frequency of occurrence as compared with words with pre-final or final stress.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niels O. Schiller

Correspondence should be addressed to Niels O. Schiller, Universiteit Maastricht, Faculty of Psychology, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, P. O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. [email protected]