Offline and online processing of acoustic cues to word stress in Papuan Malay

Abstract

The present study investigates to what extent acoustic cues to word stress facilitate both offline and online word processing in Papuan Malay. Previous production research has shown acoustic evidence for word-stress patterns in this language, counter to earlier predictions. A discussion of the literature on word stress perception and word stress in Papuan Malay is provided and complemented with reports of three word recognition tasks. The first two presented sequences of acoustically manipulated syllable dyads to native listeners in an offline word recognition task. This was done in order to investigate the individual contribution of each of the acoustic cues (F0, duration, intensity, spectral tilt) to the perception of word stress. F0 appeared a relevant cue when stimuli were embedded in a phrase, not in isolation. A follow-up reaction time experiment (online processing) investigated to what extent word recognition was facilitated when either an acoustically weak or an acoustically strong syllable was the cue to identify a word. Reaction times were shorter for strong syllables than for weak syllables. The outcomes suggest that Papuan Malay has a form of perceptually relevant word stress, which is particularly salient for irregular (ultimate) stress rather than for regular (penultimate) stress.

Papuan Malay word stress reduces lexical alternatives

“…It was found that vowel reduction in Papuan Malay is among the strongest acoustic correlates of word stress [23]. Perception experiments using manipulated stimuli showed that Papuan Malay listeners were mainly sensitive for the irregular penultimate stress pattern [25]. Crucially, in [25] the effect of vowel reduction on stress perception was not tested.…”

“…To investigate the number of embedded words, a list of phonetically transcribed Papuan Malay words was used (Appendix A in [25]). The list consisted of a written lexeme, a phonetic transcription, a word class label and an English gloss.…”

“…[23]). The phonetic transcriptions included diacritics and thus allow for a precise comparison between lexemes, representative of spoken language [25] Before obtaining the number of embedded words, duplicates (e.g. homonyms such as pasang for 'pair' or 'market') were removed from the word list such that only single instances of each word in the list were left.…”

“…Although a fair number of words might not be frequently occurring in spontaneous speech, the word list still provides a subset that is representative for the language. That is, the words in the list were elicited in spontaneous conversations and formed the basis for phonological analyses in [25]. In addition, a possible confounding effect due to the lack of frequency data would affect the total number of embeddings and the subset of stressmatching embeddings in an equal way.…”

“…Furthermore, the only two mid-vowels in Papuan Malay (/ε/ and /ɔ/) tend to reject the otherwise regular penultimate stress pattern consistently [24], indicating the importance of vowel quality in word stress placement. Preliminary perceptual evidence [25] suggested that listeners are particularly sensitive to the irregular (ultimate) stress pattern. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent word stress patterns facilitate word recognition in this language.…”