The influence of individual differences in language experience on lexical stress cue-weighting: native and non-native listeners

Learning to process the prosody of a second language can be challenging, particularly when the languages present different prosodic structures, as is the case for English and French. Although previous studies suggested that French listeners are unable to process lexical stress, more recent work suggests that they can, although they might assign a different weight to F0 and duration as stress cues compared to native listeners. To determine if this is the case, forty-two English-French bilinguals participated in two experiments investigating the impact of individual differences in language experience on F0 and duration weight when perceiving lexical stress. Interestingly, participants' language experience could predict the weight assigned to F0 and duration as cues to lexical stress in the behavioral task from Experiment 1, but not the event-related potentials of Experiment 2. Together, these results suggest that prosodic learning involves learning to assign the (language-specific) appropriate weight to non-language-specific acoustic-prosodic cues.