Quantity-sensitivity affects recall performance of word stress

Previous studies showed that word stress patterns need to be lexically stored when they are highly variable. Hence, listeners are better at memorizing stress patterns in recall tasks when their native language has variable stress patterns than when their native language has fixed stress patterns. The current study hypothesizes that in quantity-sensitive stress languages, segmental information facilitates stress perception and therefore makes smaller demands on lexical storage than in languages with quantity-insensitive stress patterns. This prediction is tested in two stress recall tasks with German (var. stress, q-sensitive) and Greek (var. stress, q-insensitive) listeners. Results show that German listeners indeed perform worse than Greek listeners. The outcomes provide an important novel perspective on the interaction between segmental and suprasegmental information in speech perception and nuance lexical statistics accounts of word stress.