A typological study of stress ‘deafness’

Previous research has shown that native speakers of French, as opposed to those of Spanish, exhibit stress 'deafness', i.e. have difficulties distinguishing stress contrasts. In French, stress is non-contrastive, while in Spanish, stress is used to make lexical distinctions. We examine three other languages with non-contrastive stress, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish. In two experiments with a short-term memory sequence repetition task, we find that speakers of Finnish and Hungarian are like French speakers (i.e. exhibit stress 'deafness'), but not those of Polish. We interpret these findings in the light of an acquisition framework, that states that infants decide whether or not to keep stress in their phonological representation during the first two years of life, based on information extractable from utterance edges. In particular, we argue that Polish infants, unlike French, Finnish and Hungarian ones, cannot extract the stress regularity of their language on the basis of what they have already learned. As a consequence, they keep stress in their phonological representation, and as adults, they do not have difficulties in distinguishing stress contrasts. 1. Introduction It has long been known that speech perception is influenced by phonological properties of the listener's native language (Sapir 1921; Polivanov 1974). Much experimental evidence has been gathered concerning this influence, suggesting that listeners use a set of language-specific phoneme categories during speech perception. For instance, Goto (1971) has documented that Japanese listeners map American [l] and [r] onto their own, single, [ä] category, and, as a result, have a lot of difficulties in discriminating between them. Similarly, the contrast between the retroflex and dental stops [ÿ] – [t° ] is very difficult for the English, but not for the Hindi speaker (Werker & Tees 1984b). This contrast is, in fact, phonemic in Hindi, whereas neither of the stop consonants involved occurs in English; rather, English uses the alveolar stop [t]. The influence of suprasegmental properties of the native language has also been investigated. found that French subjects exhibit great difficulties in discriminating non-words that differ only in the location of stress. In French, stress does not carry lexical information, but predictably falls on the word's final vowel. Speakers of French, then, do not need to process stress to identify lexical items; given its fixed position, stress may instead be used as a cue to word segmentation (Rietveld 1980). The term 'deafness' is meant to designate the effect of listeners having difficulties in discriminating …