Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental cues to English stress
Dutch listeners outperform native listeners in
identifying syllable stress in English. This is
because lexical stress is more useful in recognition
of spoken words of Dutch than of English, so that
Dutch listeners pay greater attention to stress in
general. We examined Dutch listeners’ use of the
acoustic correlates of English stress. Primary- and
secondary-stressed syllables differ significantly on
acoustic measures, and some differences, in F0
especially, correlate with data of earlier listening
experiments. The correlations found in the Dutch
responses were not paralleled in data from native
listeners. Thus the acoustic cues which distinguish
English primary versus secondary stress are better
exploited by Dutch than by native listeners.
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