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This study investigates whether short-term perceptual training can enhance Seoul-Korean listeners’ use of English lexical stress in spoken word recognition. Unlike English, Seoul Korean does not have lexical stress (or lexical pitch accents/tones). Seoul-Korean speakers at a high-intermediate English proficiency completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment adapted from Connell et al. (2018) (pre-/post-test). The experiment tested whether pitch in the target stimulus (accented versus unaccented first syllable) and vowel quality in the lexical competitor (reduced versus full first vowel) modulated fixations to the target word (e.g., PARrot; ARson) over the competitor word (e.g., paRADE or PARish; arCHIVE or ARcade). In the training (eight 30-min sessions over eight days), participants heard English lexical-stress minimal pairs uttered by four talkers (high variability) or one talker (low variability), categorized them as noun (first-syllable stress) or verb (second-syllable stress), and received accuracy feedback. The results showed that neither training increased target-over-competitor fixation proportions. Crucially, the same training had been found to improve Seoul- Korean listeners’ recall of English words differing in lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2022) and their weighting of acoustic cues to English lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2023). These results suggest that short-term perceptual training has a limited effect on target-over-competitor word activation.
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This content will become publicly available on March 18, 2026
On the salience of prenuclear accents: evidence from an imitation study
Abstract Whereas some authors claim that the distribution of prenuclear accents in English largely follows from rhythmic and other non-informational considerations, other authors report a small but meaningful effect of prenuclear accents on the interpretation of sentences. In this paper we report on an experiment where native English speakers were asked to repeat stimulus sentences with one of three different accentual patterns on a word in sentence-initial prenuclear position: unaccented, with a high pitch accent on the syllable with primary stress or with a high accent on an earlier syllable with secondary stress. Participants were moderately successful in reproducing the intonational patterns. The early high accent pattern was reproduced particularly well. An automatic classification algorithm nevertheless produced four clusters of contours, instead of the three patterns present in the stimuli. Two distinct contours were used to signal the presence of a high tone before the syllable with primary stress. We conclude that the early high accent pattern is a strong attractor in imitations, but it was implemented with F0 trajectories that would be analyzed as phonologically different, suggesting an equivalence class of prenuclear contours. We also note a preference for rhythmic anchoring in the prenuclear position.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1944773
- PAR ID:
- 10598514
- Publisher / Repository:
- De Gruyter Brill
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Phonetica
- Volume:
- 82
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0031-8388
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 111 to 138
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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