Perception of stress pattern and word recognition

Theories of spoken word recognition do not explicitly take account of nonsegmental properties of the stimulus. The present research investigates how, and to what extent, acoustic information on the stress pattern of a (Dutch) word contributes to word recognition, both in hifi degraded natural speech and in synthetic speech (concatenated diphones). In a series of experiments, words with correct or incorrect stress position in the first, second, or third syllable were presented in isolation or preceded by a short carrier phrase. Words were made audible in fragments of increasing size (“gating”) so as to trace the respective contribution of stressed and unstressed syllables to the word isolation process as the stimulus develops in time. Whole word recognition was included in some of the experiments as a control task. Selected results will be presented and some of the consequences for word recognition models will be discussed.