Regular Article
The Roles of Word Stress and Vowel Harmony in Speech Segmentation,☆☆,

https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1997.2548Get rights and content

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the role of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Finnish has fixed word stress on the initial syllable, and vowels from a front or back harmony set cannot co-occur within a word. In Experiment 1, we replicated the results of Suomi, McQueen, and Cutler (1997) showing that Finns use a mismatch in vowel harmony as a word boundary cue when the target-initial syllable is unstressed. Listeners found it easier to detect words such asHYmyinPUhymy(harmony mismatch) than inPYhymy(no harmony mismatch). In Experiment 2, words had stressed target-initial syllables (HYmyas inpyHYmyorpuHYmy). Reaction times were now faster and the vowel harmony effect was greatly reduced. In Experiment 3, Finnish, Dutch, and French listeners learned to segment an artificial language. Performance was best when the phonological properties of the artificial language matched those of the native one. Finns profited, as in the previous experiments, from vowel harmony and word-initial stress; Dutch profited from word-initial stress, and French did not profit either from vowel-harmony or from word-initial stress. Vowel disharmony and word-initial stress are thus language-specific cues to word boundaries.

References (27)

  • B.D. Fear et al.

    The strong/weak syllable distinction in English

    Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

    (1995)
  • Iivonen, A. Niemi, T. Paananen, M. Do F0 peaks coincide with lexical stresses? A comparison of English, Finnish, and...
  • Kager, R. J. W. 1989, A metrical theory of stress and destressing in English and Dutch, Foris,...
  • Cited by (101)

    • Infants’ sensitivity to nonadjacent vowel dependencies: The case of vowel harmony in Hungarian

      2019, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      For the lexical level, changes in harmonicity, such as a transition from back to front vowels or from rounded to unrounded vowels, signal the boundaries of (morphologically complex) words. Indeed, adult speakers of harmonic languages, but not of nonharmonic ones, are able to use such changes in harmonicity as segmentation cues (Kabak, Maniwa, & Kazanina, 2010; Suomi, McQueen, & Cutler, 1997; Vroomen, Tuomainen, & de Gelder, 1998). Similarly, van Kampen et al. (2008) showed that in addition to being sensitive to vowel harmony at 6 months of age, Turkish-learning infants are also able to use vowel harmony, together with lexical stress, as a cue to word segmentation.

    • ERP evidence for implicit L2 word stress knowledge in listeners of a fixed-stress language

      2018, International Journal of Psychophysiology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Furthermore, incorrect stress hampered word recognition in listeners with a fixed-stress L1. Finish listeners detected the word “HYmy” [smile] faster in “pyHYmy” than in “PYhymy” (Vroomen et al., 1998). The latter finding might imply that Finish listeners store the mandatory word-initial stress position together with each word and have difficulties in accessing a word with incorrect stress.

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    The research was partly supported by a grant from the Human Frontier of Science Programme “Processing consequences of contrasting language phonologies.” The research of Jean Vroomen has been made possible by a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The research of Jyrki Tuomainen was financially supported by the Academy of Finland. Research was also partly supported by the Ministry of Education of the Belgian French-speaking Community, Concerted Research Action “Language processing in different modalities: Comparative approaches.” We thank Leo Vogten from the IPO, Eindhoven for help in preparing the stimuli of Experiment 3 and Juan Seguı́ for help in testing the French subjects. We also thank James McQueen, Arthur Samuel, Kari Suomi, James Sawusch, and two other anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of the paper.

    ☆☆

    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Jean Vroomen, Department of Social Sciences, University of Tilburg, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail:[email protected].

    R. Cole

    View full text