Acquiring Foreign Language Lexical Stress by Hearing

Abstract

Five experiments explored Spanish lexical stress codification, implicit learning of lexical stress rules, and their use in speech segmentation, by English speakers with no knowledge of any Romance language. In all experiments, participants heard Spanish words that followed lexical stress rules (e.g., words ending with consonants have iambic stress). Performance in a recognition memory task showed that lexical stress was codified and used to differentiate studied words pronounced with correct (e.g., viaJAR) and incorrect lexical stress (e.g., VIAjar). Response accuracy and discrimination analyses obtained from a lexical decision task (in which nonwords violated lexical stress rules) showed implicit learning of lexical stress rules under different attentional levels, but this knowledge could not be used in a speech segmentation task, probably due to the lack of previous exposure to the to-be-segmented words. Implications for word recognition modelling, foreign language acquisition theory, and education are discussed.