The role of stress and word size in Spanish speech segmentation
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Abstract
In English, the predominance of stressed syllables as word onsets AIDS lexical segmentation in degraded listening conditions. Yet it is unlikely that these findings would readily transfer to languages with differing rhythmic structure. In the current study, the authors seek to examine whether listeners exploit both common word size (syllable number) and stress cues to aid lexical segmentation in Spanish. Forty-seven Spanish-speaking listeners transcribed two-word Spanish phrases in noise. As predicted by the statistical probabilities of Spanish, error analysis revealed that listeners preferred two- and three-syllable words with penultimate stress in their attempts to parse the degraded speech signal. These findings provide insight into the importance of stress in tandem with word size in the segmentation of Spanish words and suggest testable hypotheses for cross-linguistic studies that examine the effects of degraded acoustic cues on lexical segmentation.
DOI
10.1121/1.4971227
Publication Date
12-1-2016
Recommended Citation
Lacross, Amy; Liss, Julie; Barragan, Beatriz; and Adams, Ashley, "The role of stress and word size in Spanish speech segmentation" (2016). Speech-Language Pathology Faculty Publications. 12.
https://scholarworks.atsu.edu/slp-faculty/12