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Online processing of suprasegmental information in English-German cognates
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Jonas Gerards1,2, Alexandra Jesse3, Ulrike Domahs1,2,4; 1University of Marburg, 2GRK2700 "Dynamics and stability of linguistic representations", 3University of Massachusetts Amherst, 4Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior
Suprasegmental information can serve as a cue in word recognition, particularly in languages with lexical stress (Cutler and Jesse 2021). Previous behavioral (e.g., Cutler & Pasveer 2006; Jesse et al., 2017) and EEG studies on word processing in English and German (Bohn et al., 2013; Henrich et al., 2014) have shown that listeners of both languages utilize suprasegmental stress cues for word recognition in their native languages as they become available. In a visual-word paradigm with printed words overlapping in the first two syllables, English native listeners fixated target words with initial primary stress (e.g., Analog; capital letters indicating primary stress) more than stress competitors with lexical stress on the third syllable (e.g., anaLYtic), already before distinguishing segmental information was available (Jesse et al., 2017). In an EEG study investigating the processing of English stress shifts, processing initial word stress rather than final stress (e.g. 'Ideal' instead of 'iDEAL') resulted in a P200 response immediately after the first syllable was encountered (Henrich et al. 2014). The present experiment examined whether this sensitivity to suprasegmental information also exists in L2 speech processing, and whether it is influenced by the consistency of stress patterns across cognates. Some English words share the stress pattern of their German equivalent (e.g., anaLYtic – anaLYtisch), but most differ in stress position (e.g., Analog - anaLOG), which may impede the processing of initial stress for German learners of English. Note that derived words from Romance origin never carry primary stress in the word initial syllable in German and therefore, the manipulation of English words (initial primary vs. secondary stress) coincides with stress match and mismatch across English-German cognates. Since suprasegmental information is more important in German than in English, we expect German L2 English listeners to use stress information for disambiguation before segmental information becomes available. However, words with initial primary stress show a mismatch in the stress pattern across cognate words in the two languages. Therefore, a potential interference between German and English could lead to suprasegmental information being less helpful in such words. In a visual-world paradigm, twenty-four German learners of English followed the auditory-presented instructions Click on the word X, while their eye fixations to two displayed critical words and two distractor words were tracked. Critical word pairs showed segmental overlap in their first two syllables but differed in stress. One word had initial primary stress; the other one had initial secondary stress and primary stress on the third syllable. Results for German L2 learners indicate disambiguation of a critical pair before the end of segmental overlap for targets with initial primary stress. This finding suggests that the different stress patterns in the German and English version of these words do not lead to an interference effect in word recognition for German native listeners. German learners of English demonstrate the same early disambiguation advantage for words with initial primary stress as previously found for native English listeners.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Multilingualism