Papuan Malay word stress reduces lexical alternatives

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which word stress facilitates word disambiguation in Papuan Malay. Although there is consistent acoustic support for word stress patterns in this language, the function of word stress in Indonesian languages, including Papuan Malay, has been disputed in several studies. Based on a word list of phonetically transcribed Papuan Malay words, an analysis of wordembeddings was carried out. The number of words that are embedded in other words was shown to explain the role of word stress in the word recognition processes crosslinguistically. The results of the lexical analysis indicate that Papuan Malay is somewhat similar to English, a language where word stress differences are mainly signalled by vowel quality and to a lesser extent by suprasegmental cues. The results are discussed within the context of cross-linguistic cues to word stress and shed a new light on the controversy concerning word stress in Indonesian languages.

The perception of word stress cues in Papuan Malay: A typological perspective and experimental investigation

“…This result crucially complements the lexical analysis in Kaland and van Heuven (2020) and Kaland et al (2021), in which a representative subset of the Papuan Malay lexicon showed that stress information could have a facilitating effect word disambiguation, in addition to the segmental information. Although this facilitation is smaller in Papuan Malay than in languages with less regular stress patterns such as Spanish, the results showed that the Papuan Malay lexicon leaves room for a facilitating role of stress to a similar extent as found for English (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland et al, 2021). The results of the current study confirm that listeners are indeed able to rely on stress cues for word disambiguation.…”

“…On the basis of the current gating experiment it can therefore be concluded that Papuan Malay listeners are indeed able to use these cues when they don't have an alternative. Given that there is a role for Papuan Malay word stress parameters to disambiguate embedded words (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland et al, 2021), listeners have an incentive to use them and, given the current results, will do so. It should be noted that word disambiguation does not concern a problem Papuan Malay listeners face regularly.…”

“…Note that Papuan Malay is a regional language spoken in the provinces Papua and West-Papua, across different major urban areas (Kluge, 2017, p. xxiv), which are the home of many smaller local languages as well. The research conducted on this language so far involved participants from the Sarmi region (Kluge, 2017;Kaland, Himmelmann, & Kluge, 2019;Kaland & van Heuven, 2020), Manokwari (Kaland, 2019(Kaland, , 2020Kaland & Baumann, 2020), and Sentani (this study). Although it should be noted that these regions exhibit dialectal differences, Papuan Malay is a distinct language due to its "structural uniqueness, limited or nonexistent inherent intelligibility, and the lack of shared ethnolinguistic identity with other Malay varieties" (Kluge, 2017, p. 9).…”

“…The effect could have been partially caused by a generic processing benefit for word-initial syllables, although the predominance of P stress in Papuan Malay makes it difficult to disentangle a generic effect from one that is exclusively related to word stress. Another study showed that the number of lexical embeddings (see also Section 1.3) is reduced when taking into account stress information in Papuan Malay (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020). This would mean that listeners can successfully reject activated word candidates during processing, if they make use of the stress cues.…”

“…That is, for investigating how meaningful word stress patterns are in a particular language, perception studies are indispensable (see also Section 1.2 and 2.2), and are likely to show different degrees of listener sensitivity for stress patterns (Peperkamp et al, 2010). Lexical analyses have shown that word stress information can help to disambiguate competing lexical candidates (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland, Kluge, & van Heuven, 2021). Thus, whether listeners actually make use of the available stress cues if the segments are ambiguous remains to be tested directly.…”