Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the role of suprasegmental information in the processing of spoken words. All primes consisted of truncated spoken Dutch words. Recognition of visually presented word targets was facilitated by prior auditory presentation of the first two syllables of the same words as primes, but only if they were appropriately stressed (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by okTO-); inappropriate stress, compatible with another word (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by OCto-, the beginning of octopus), produced inhibition. Monosyllabic fragments (e.g., OC-) also produced facilitation when appropriately stressed; if inappropriately stressed, they produced neither facilitation nor inhibition. The bisyllabic fragments that were compatible with only one word produced facilitation to semantically associated words, but inappropriate stress caused no inhibition of associates. The results are explained within a model of spoken-word recognition involving competition between simultaneously activated phonological representations followed by activation of separate conceptual representations for strongly supported lexical candidates; at the level of the phonological representations, activation is modulated by both segmental and suprasegmental information.

Previous experiments using a word-spotting task suggest that English listeners use metrically strong syllables to segment continuous speech into discrete words (Cutler & Norris, 1988). The present study is concerned with this metrical segmentation strategy in Dutch. Although Dutch and English share general metrical properties, they differ in ways that may affect segmentation. First, the acoustic cues for metrically strong syllables are less salient in Dutch than in English; hence a metrical segmentation strategy is less likely to be applied by Dutch listeners. Second, vowel quality depends less on metrical structure in Dutch than in English; hence segmentation in Dutch is presumably triggered by other acoustic cues, namely, those related to stress. Experiment 1 shows that stress strongly affects Dutch listeners' ability and speed in spotting Dutch monosyllabic words in disyllabic nonwords. Experiment 2, however, finds the same stress effect when only the target words are presented, without a subsequent syllable triggering segmentation. A third experiment shows a small effect of vowel quality on error scores, but not on latencies. These results suggest that Dutch listeners do not apply a metrical segmentation strategy. The discrepancy between the two languages suggests that segmentation strategies may depend on language-specific regularities in the phonology and in the lexicon.

Words can be distinguished by segmental differences or by suprasegmental differences or both. Studies from English suggest that suprasegmentals play little role in human spoken-word recognition; English stress, however, is nearly always unambiguously coded in segmental structure (vowel quality); this relationship is less close in Dutch. The present study directly compared the effects of segmental and suprasegmental mispronunciation on word recognition in Dutch. There was a strong effect of suprasegmental mispronunciation, suggesting that Dutch listeners do exploit suprasegmental information in word recognition. Previous findings indicating the effects of mis-stressing for Dutch differ with stress position were replicated only when segmental change was involved, suggesting that this is an effect of segmental rather than suprasegmental processing.

Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about the semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET, 'athlete') and a previously presented visual prime word (e.g. SPORT 'sport') when the spoken word was mis-stressed. The adverse effect of mis-stressing confirms the role o f stress information in lexical recognition in Dutch. However, although the erroneous stress pattern was always initially compatible with a competing word (e.g. ATlas, 'atlas'), mis-stressed words did not produced high false alarm rates in unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT -atLAS). This suggests that stress information did not completely rule out segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching words, a finding consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.