The Roles of Word Stress and Vowel Harmony in Speech Segmentation (original) (raw)

1998, Journal of Memory and Language

Three experiments investigated the role of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Finnish has fixed word stress on the initial syllable, and vowels from a front or back harmony set cannot co-occur within a word. In Experiment 1, we replicated the results of Suomi, McQueen, and Cutler (1997) showing that Finns use a mismatch in vowel harmony as a word boundary cue when the target-initial syllable is unstressed. Listeners found it easier to detect words such as HYmy in PUhymy (harmony mismatch) than in PYhymy (no harmony mismatch). In Experiment 2, words had stressed target-initial syllables (HYmy as in pyHYmy or puHYmy). Reaction times were now faster and the vowel harmony effect was greatly reduced. In Experiment 3, Finnish, Dutch, and French listeners learned to segment an artificial language. Performance was best when the phonological properties of the artificial language matched those of the native one. Finns profited, as in the previous experiments, from vowel harmony and word-initial stress; Dutch profited from word-initial stress, and French did not profit either from vowel-harmony or from word-initial stress. Vowel disharmony and word-initial stress are thus language-specific cues to word boundaries. ᭧ 1998 Academic Press One of the major issues in spoken word problem is to understand how listeners segment the continuous speech signal into dis-recognition concerns the detection of word boundaries in continuous speech. The central crete words when there are no reliable acoustic cues that signal the beginnings of words. A number of alternative ideas have appeared in The research was partly supported by a grant from the the literature that point toward a possible solu-Human Frontier of Science Programme ''Processing consetion. A major division can be made between quences of contrasting language phonologies.'' The research of Jean Vroomen has been made possible by a fellowship proposals that emphasize acoustic/phonetic of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. cues and those that focus on lexical or contex-The research of Jyrki Tuomainen was financially supported tual processes. In the former, word boundaries by the Academy of Finland. Research was also partly supare located on the basis of local perceptual ported by the Ministry of Education of the Belgian Frenchfeatures such as the presence of glottal stops, speaking Community, Concerted Research Action ''Language processing in different modalities: Comparative ap-laryngealized voicing, increased aspiration, or proaches.'' We thank Leo Vogten from the IPO, Eindhoven for help in preparing the stimuli of Experiment 3 and Juan Address correspondence and reprint requests to Jean SeguıB for help in testing the French subjects. We also thank