Speaking Rate Affects the Perception of Duration as a Suprasegmental Lexical-stress Cue

Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language and speech 2011-06, Vol.54 (2), p.147-165
Main Authors: Reinisch, Eva, Jesse, Alexandra, McQueen, James M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accentuation
Acoustic Stimulation
Audiometry, Speech
Behavior
Context
Cues
Dutch language
Evaluation Methods
Experiments
Foreign Countries
Humans
Investigations
Language Arts
Lexicology
Linguistics
Listening Comprehension
Netherlands
Perceptions
Phonemes
Phonemics
Phonetics
Phonology
Recognition (Psychology)
Sentences
Sound duration
Speech
Speech Acoustics
Speech Communication
Speech Intelligibility
Speech Perception
Speech rate
Stimuli
Stress
Suprasegmentals
Syllables
Time Factors
Time Perception
Vocabulary development
Voice recognition
Vowels
Word Recognition
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Summary:Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress placement. Word pairs contrasted primary stress on either the first versus the second syllable or the first versus the third syllable. Duration of the initial or the second syllable of the fragments and rate of the preceding context (fast vs. slow) were manipulated. Listeners used speaking rate to decide about the degree of stress on initial syllables whether the syllables’ absolute durations were informative about stress (Experiment 1a) or not (Experiment 1b). Rate effects on the second syllable were visible only when the initial syllable was ambiguous in duration with respect to the preceding rate context (Experiment 2). Absolute second syllable durations contributed little to stress perception (Experiment 3). These results suggest that speaking rate is used to disambiguate words and that rate-modulated stress cues are more important on initial than non-initial syllables. Speaking rate affects perception of suprasegmental information.
ISSN:0023-8309
1756-6053
DOI:10.1177/0023830910397489