English listeners largely disregard suprasegmental cues to stress in recognizing words. Evidence for
this includes the demonstration of Fear et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 1893–1904 1995 that
cross-splicings are tolerated between stressed and unstressed full vowels e.g., au- of autumn,
automata. Dutch listeners, however, do exploit suprasegmental stress cues in recognizing
native-language words. In this study, Dutch listeners were presented with English materials from the study of Fear et al. Acceptability ratings by these listeners revealed sensitivity to suprasegmental mismatch, in particular, in replacements of unstressed full vowels by higher-stressed vowels, thus evincing greater sensitivity to prosodic goodness than had been shown by the original native listener group. |