Native and non-native listeners’ perception of Serbian lexical pitch accents

The present study explores the perceptual similarity space of Serbian lexical pitch accents as perceived by speakers of a lexical pitch accent language (native Serbian speakers) and speakers of a language with no lexical prosodic contrast (French speakers). Some 40 Serbian and 60 French speakers carried out an online free classification task which required them to listen to nonwords and position digital icons representing them in proximity to each other based on their similarity. Given that Serbian is a pitch-accent language, each nonword carried a lexical pitch accent type patterned according to Serbian word-level prosodic rules. The accent types therefore consisted of a combination of length (long, short) and pitch (rising, falling). To interpret the results, we applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) and clustering analyses, which revealed length as a clear dimension of the perceptual salience of lexical pitch accent, while pitch movement distinctions varied.