This study investigates how listeners’ knowledge of acoustic cues to lexical stress in the native language (L1) modulates their perception of lexical stress in a second language (L2), providing a further test of the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis for lexical stress. Languages that have lexical stress differ in how stress is realized acoustically. To illustrate, whereas stressed syllables (with an intonational pitch accent) have a higher pitch, longer duration, and higher intensity than unstressed syllables (ceteris paribus) in both English and Dutch, unstressed vowels show a greater degree of centralization in English than in Dutch (e.g., Sluijter & van Heuven, 1996). These acoustic differences create perceptual biases in the L1 that may in turn affect listeners’ perception of lexical stress in the L2. For example, previous research has shown that English listeners rely more strongly on vowel quality than on pitch, duration, or intensity when perceiving English stress (e.g., Chrabaszcz et al., 2014; Zhang & Francis, 2010), whereas Dutch listeners rely more on duration than on vowel quality when perceiving Dutch stress (e.g., van Heuven & de Jonge, 2011); these perceptual biases have been hypothesized to result in Dutch listeners’ greater use of suprasegmental cues to English stress in spoken word recognition compared to English listeners (e.g., Cooper et al., 2002), although this has not been tested explicitly. This present study provides a test of the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis for lexical stress by examining Dutch listeners' weighting of acoustic cues to English stress.

Chrabaszcz, A., Winn, M., Lin, C. Y., & Idsardi, W. J. (2014). Acoustic cues to perception of word stress by English, Mandarin, and Russian speakers. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57, 1468-1479.

Cooper, N., Cutler, A., & Wales, R. (2002). Constraints of lexical stress on lexical access in English: Evidence from native and non-native listeners. Language and Speech, 45, 207-228.

Sluijter, A. M. C., & van Heuven, V. J. (1996 ). Acoustic correlates of linguistic stress and accent in Dutch and American English Proceedings of the International Congress of Spoken Language Processing. Newark: University of Delaware.

van Heuven, V. J., & de Jonge, M. (2011). Spectral and temporal reduction as stress cues in Dutch. Phonetica, 68(3), 120-132.

Zhang, Y., & Francis, A. (2010). The weighting of vowel quality in native and non-native listeners’ perception of English lexical stress. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 260-271.

This study investigates whether listeners’ use of prosodic cues to lexical contrasts can transfer from the processing of one phonological phenomenon in the native (i.e., first) language (L1) to the processing of another phonological phenomenon in a second language (L2). It does so by investigating L2 learners’ processing of lexical stress contrasts in English. Theories of L2 lexical-stress processing fall into one of two approaches. The phonological approach (e.g., Stress Parameter Model) predicts that listeners’ ability to process lexical stress in the L2 is determined by whether listeners encode lexical stress in their L1 phonological representations, which has been proposed to take place when lexical stress is neither fixed nor predictable in the L1 (e.g., Dupoux et al., 2001, 2008; Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2002). By contrast, the phonetic approach (e.g., Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis) predicts that listeners’ ability to process lexical stress in the L2 is determined by the degree to which the acoustic cues to lexical stress in the L2 signal lexical contrasts in the L1, even if the L1 does not have lexical stress (e.g., Qin et al., 2017; Tremblay et al., 2018; Zhan & Francis, 2010). This study provides another test of these theories by investigating how Gyeongsang Korean (GK) and Seoul Korean (SK) listeners process English lexical stress contrasts realized with suprasegmental cues. GK does not have lexical stress or lexical tones, but it has lexical pitch accents, with fundamental frequency (F0) serving as the main cue to pitch accent contrasts (e.g., Lee et al., 2016). Unlike GK, SK does not have lexical pitch accents, neither does it have lexical stress or lexical tones . The phonological (e.g., Stress Parameter) approach predicts that the two groups should not differ in their processing of lexical stress contrasts in English, as neither dialect of Korean has lexical stress. By contrast, the phonetic (e.g., cue-weighting) approach predicts that GK listeners should outperform SK listeners in the processing of lexical stress contrasts when these contrasts are realized with suprasegmental cues in English.

Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2001). A robust method to study stress ‘deafness’. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 110, 1606-1618.

Dupoux, E., Sebastián-Gallés, N., Navarrete, E., & Peperkamp, S. (2008). Persistent stress ‘deafness’: The case of French learners of Spanish. Cognition, 106, 682-706.

Lee, H., Jongman, A., & Zhang, J. (2016). Variation and change in the nominal pitch-accent system of South Kyungsang Korean. Phonology, 33, 325-351.

Peperkamp, S., & Dupoux, E. (2002). A typological study of stress “deafness.” Laboratory Phonology, 7, 203-240.

Qin, Z., Chien, Y. F., & Tremblay, A. (2017). Processing of word-level stress by Mandarin-speaking second language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38, 541-570.

Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., & Coughlin, C. E. (2018). The functional weight of prosodic cues in the native language predicts the learning of speech segmentation in a second language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 21, 640–652.

Zhang, Y., & Francis, A. (2010). The weighting of vowel quality in native and non-native listeners’ perception of English lexical stress. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 260-271.

This study examines the use of spectral and durational cues in the recognition of spoken English words containing /i/ or /ɪ/ by native English listeners and Korean L2 learners of English. Whereas English has the /i/-/ɪ/ contrast and English listeners rely more on spectral cues than on durational cues to perceive this contrast (e.g., Escudero, 2000; Flege et al., 1997), Korean has only the vowel /i/ (e.g., Cho & Jeong, 2013; Yun, 2014) and Korean L2 learners of English were found to rely more on durational cues than on spectral cues when perceiving the English /i/-/ɪ/ contrast (e.g., Kim et al., 2017, 2018; Lee, 2009). However, it is unclear whether the same findings would hold true of spoken word recognition, as previous studies on this topic used offline perception tasks (e.g., forced-choice identification) that encouraged listeners to explicitly attend to acoustic cues. This study uses an online cross-modal priming task to elucidate how L2 learners’ implicit use of spectral and durational cues affects the degree of activation of words that (mis)match these cues.

Cho, M.-H., & Jeong, S. (2013). Perception and production of English vowels by Korean learners: A Case study. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology, 19, 155–177.

Escudero, P. (2000). Developmental patterns in the adult L2 acquisition of new contrasts: The acoustic cue weighting in the perception of Scottish tense/lax vowels by Spanish speakers (Doctoral dissertation). University of Edinburgh.

Flege, J. E., Bohn, O. S., & Jang, S. (1997). Effects of experience on non-native speakers’ production and perception of English vowels. Journal of Phonetics, 25, 437–470.

Kim, D., Clayards, M., & Goad, H. (2017). Individual differences in second language speech perception across tasks and contrasts: The case of english vowel contrasts by Korean learners. Linguistics Vanguard, 3, 1–11.

Kim, D., Clayards, M., & Goad, H. (2018). A longitudinal study of individual differences in the acquisition of new vowel contrasts. Journal of Phonetics, 67, 1–20.

Lee, J. (2009). Perception of English high vowels by Korean speakers of English. Phonetics and Speech Sciences, 1, 39–46.

Yun, G. (2014). Korean listeners’ perception of L2 English phoneme contrast. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, 20, 161–185.

This study investigates how phonological and phonetic aspects of the native-language (L1) intonation modulate the use of tonal cues in second-language (L2) speech segmentation. Previous research suggested that the learning of prosodic cues is more difficult if the L1 and L2 intonations are phonologically similar but phonetically different (French vs. Korean) than if they are phonologically different (English vs. French/Korean) (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis; Tremblay et al., 2016). This study provides another test of this hypothesis by examining French and English listeners’ segmentation of Korean speech. (Seoul) Korean has been analyzed as having an Accentual Phrase (AP) with a L(HL)H tonal pattern for APs beginning with a lenis segment (Jun, 1998), with the AP-initial L tone being closely aligned with the AP-initial syllable. French has similarly been analyzed as having an AP with a L(HL)H tonal pattern (Jun & Fougeron, 2002), but in French the AP-initial L tone is not closely aligned to the AP-initial syllable (Welby & Loevenbruck, 2006). In contrast, English words are often stressed initially (Cutler & Carter, 1987), with nuclear-pitch-accented words beginning with an H tone (Beckman, 1986). Tremblay et al. (2016)’s Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis predicts that the phonological similarities between the Korean and French intonations should prevent French listeners from learning the fine-grained phonetic differences between French and Korean. By contrast, the striking phonological differences between the Korean and the English intonations should enable English-speaking L2 learners of Korean to learn the differences between the Korean and English systems.

Beckman, M. E., & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986). Intonational structure in English and Japanese. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255-310.

Cutler, A., & Carter, D. M. (1987). The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech and Language, 2, 133-142.

Jun, S.-A. (1998). The Accentual Phrase in the Korean prosodic hierarchy. Phonology, 15, 189-226.

Jun, S.-A., & Fougeron, C. (2002). Realizations of accentual phrase in French intonation. Probus, 14, 147-172.

Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2009). The use of phrase-level prosodic information in lexical segmentation: Evidence from word-spotting experiments in Korean. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 3373-3386.

Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., Coughlin, C. E., & Choi, J. (2016). Effects of the native language on the learning of fundamental frequency in second-language speech segmentation. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 985.

Welby, P., & Loevenbruck, H. (2006). Anchored down in Anchorage: Syllable structure and segmental anchoring in French. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 18, 74-124.