Running head: FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION

This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha [shower], ciuDAD [city]; stressed syllables in capital letters) and subsequently performed a recognition task, in which studied words were presented with the same lexical stress pattern (DUcha) or the opposite lexical stress pattern (CIUdad). Participants were able to discriminate samefrom opposite-stress words, indicating that lexical stress was encoded and used in the recognition process. Word-form similarity to English also influenced outcomes, with Spanish cognate words and words with trochaic-stress (MANgo) being recognized more often and more quickly than Spanish cognate words with iambic stress (soLAR) and noncognates. The results suggest that while segmental and suprasegmental features of the native language influence foreign word recognition, foreign lexical stress patterns are encoded and not discarded in memory. FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 3 Recognition Memory for Foreign Language Lexical Stress Lexical stress refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables within single words. For example, the word pencil is pronounced with more stress on the first syllable (/ˈpen/) than on the second syllable (/səl/). The present study employed a recognition memory task to investigate two research questions: first, whether English speakers use foreign lexical stress cues to recognise newly learned Spanish words, and second, the extent to which similarity to English word-forms influences the recognition process. Lexical stress cues in English and Spanish Acoustic measurements of lexical stress include pitch, intensity, and duration of word segments (Curtin, Campbell, & Hufnagle, 2012; Peperkamp, Vendelin, & Dupoux, 2010). In English, stressed syllables contain vowels that are pronounced with higher pitch and intensity and are longer than vowels in unstressed syllables (Fear, Cutler, & Butterfield, 1995). Typically, unstressed syllables contain the vowel schwa, or a short form of a vowel (Cutler & Norris, 1988). In contrast, stressed syllables contain only full vowels, making stressed syllables longer than unstressed ones (Van Donselaar, Koster, & Cutler, 2005). In the Singapore English variety spoken by our participants, vowels in unstressed syllables are not reduced as much as in Standard English (Low, Grabe, & Nolan, 2000). However, both Standard and Singapore English reduce vowel duration in unstressed syllables in comparison with Spanish. In polysyllabic Spanish words, vowels in both stressed and unstressed syllables are full vowels, and have similar durations (Soto-Faraco, Sebastián-Gallés, & Cutler, 2001; Van Donselaar et al., 2005). As a result, in Spanish, stressed syllables are differentiated from unstressed ones by pitch and intensity changes (Soto-Faraco et al., 2001; Toro, SebastiánGallés, & Mattys, 2009). FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 4 Soto-Faraco et al. (2001) suggested that lexical stress cues may be critical in Spanish because they can be used to disambiguate many otherwise identical words existing in the Spanish lexicon (e.g., TÉRmino [clause] vs. terMIno [I finish] vs. termiNÓ [he finished]). Soto-Faraco et al. showed that the auditory prime prinCI facilitated the recognition of the written word prinCIpio (beginning), but that the same prime inhibited lexical access to the word PRINcipe (prince). In contrast, Cooper, Cutler, and Wales (2002) showed that a prime such as ADmi facilitated the identification of the English word ADmiral but that the same prime did not inhibit a word such admiRAtion. This shows that lexical stress is a more constraining feature in Spanish than in English during word recognition. There is also evidence suggesting that lexical stress may not be as significant during word recognition in English. For example, Creel, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2006) asked English-speaking participants to memorize nonwords associated with nonsense figures. After learning the word-figure associations, participants engaged in a four-alternative forced choice (4AFC) task where the target (e.g., /BOsapeI/) and competitor (/BOsapaI/) shared onset and lexical stress patterns or shared onset but mismatched on lexical stress (/KAdazu/ and /kaDAzei/). Lexical stress mismatches did not reduce the level of confusion between target and competitor, relative to the condition where target and competitor matched for stress and onset, suggesting that English speakers use segmental information but not lexical stress during word recognition. One inference that can be drawn from these findings is that, for English speakers, suprasegmental lexical stress cues may be treated as “noise” and therefore not encoded into longterm memory when a foreign language is encoutered for the first time. However, research using the recognition memory paradigm has shown that “peripheral” and contextual information are retained even when the task is to recognize the more “central” information. For example, people retain indexical properties of spoken words, such as voice attributes, when comparing performance between conditions where the same talker and word are presented during the study and test phases, versus a different talker but the same word during the test phase (e.g, Goh, 2005; Goldinger, 1996). FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 5 Similar findings have also been found with melody recognition, where melodies with the same or a different timbre or format between study and test phases were manipulated (e.g., Lim & Goh, 2012, in press; Peretz, Gaudreau, & Bonnel, 1998). In all cases, the same condition, whether it is talker, timbre, or format, elicited more yes responses (i.e., the stimuli were recognised as previously studied) than did the different (or opposite) condition during recognition, suggesting that these features are retained in memory. The focus of the present study is on whether English speakers encode pitch and intensity cues when they memorize Spanish words. Note that, in Spanish, the quality and duration of the vowel is the same in stressed and unstressed syllables. Thus, vowel quality and duration changes cannot be used to cue lexical stress. Following the design used in the previous studies on recognition memory, English speakers memorised spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha) and were then tested with words spoken with the same lexical stress (i.e., DUcha) or the opposite stress (i.e., duCHA). If English speakers are sensitive to the suprasegmental cues of pitch and intensity, they should retain the lexical patterns of the studied Spanish words and be able to discriminate DUcha from duCHA. However, what would happen when English speakers are requested to study cognate words that differ in lexical stress between English and Spanish (e.g., LOcal and loCAL, respectively)? Would they remember loCAL (correct in Spanish) or LOcal (incorrect in Spanish, but correct in English)? Since the retention of foreign lexical stress cues may be dependent on word-form similarity with the native language, it is important to also consider the similarities and differences between English and Spanish word forms and the potential influences on recognition performance. Native language influences English and Spanish differ in lexical stress distributions. In English, stress tends to fall on the first syllable of a word (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006; Cutler & Carter, 1987; Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999); hence, English has a relatively fixed trochaic-stress pattern (Van Donselaar et al., 2005). English speakers seem to be sensitive to such a distributional stress bias. For example, EnglishFOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 6 speaking adults stress the first syllable of disyllabic nonwords (that simulate nouns in sentences) because 94% of disyllabic words possess trochaic stress (Kelly & Bock, 1988). Sanders, Neville, and Woldorff (2002) showed that English-speakers spotted phonemes more accurately when these were located in trochaic words; in contrast, Spanish speakers did not show this lexical stress bias. Moreover, there are differences in the extent to which lexical stress assignment is associated with structural properties of the syllables. In English, consonant clusters in a syllable determine lexical stress (Kelly, 2004). This is not the case for Spanish. For example, the cognates dragón (dragon) and cristal (crystal) are stressed on the first syllable in English and on the second syllable in Spanish, showing that syllabic weight is not an indicator of lexical stress in Spanish. However, although lexical stress placement in Spanish words has been labeled as nonpredictable (Peperkamp et al., 2010), stress placement is not totally free in Spanish. Disyllabic nouns ending with a vowel tend to be trochaic while those ending with a consonant tend to be iambic (Archibald, 1993; Gutiérrez-Palma & Palma-Reyes, 2008). For example, cognate words such as poni (pony), polo, and kilo, are all pronounced with trochaic-stress in both English and Spanish, whereas words such as actor, doctor, and local are trochaic in English, but iambic in Spanish. Guion, Harada, and Clark (2004) showed that proficient Spanish-English bilinguals did not use syllabic structure to place lexical stress in (English) nonwords as monolingual English speakers did, and Archibald showed that native Spanish speakers were influenced by Spanish lexical stress patterns while reading English words aloud. This suggests that the structure of the first language has a strong effect on the lexical stress processing of the second language. The second research question of this study was whether or not English lexical stress patterns would affect lexical stress recognition of newly learned Spanish words. The influence of the native language on the processing of foreign words could be directly examined by looking at the differential effects of cognate and noncognate words. Cognate words are words that have forms that are perceptually similar in different languages (De Groot & Nas, 1991). English and Spanish share multiple cognates. However, many of them differ in the position of lexical FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 7 stress (e.g., ACtor and acTOR, in English and Spanish, respectively). It is possible that Spanish cognate words might activate their English translations and affect the encoding and subsequent recognition of the Spanish words. Evidence for the automatic activation of cognate words in two languages was found by Strijkers, Costa, and Thierry (2010), who used electroencephalography measures to examine cognate and word frequency effects during the course of lexical access. Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals performed a picture naming task in Spanish. For both groups of bilinguals, cognates and high-frequency words were named faster than noncognates and low-frequency words. Cognate event-related potentials’ (ERPs) amplitudes started to diverge from noncognate ERPs as early as 190 ms after picture onset. Likewise, high-frequency words departed from low-frequency words at 180 ms after picture presentation. These results led Strijkers et al. to hypothesize that, upon uttering or hearing a cognate word, both the current lexical representation and its translation are strongly activated. As a result, cognates behave like high-frequency words, since both are activated often. Moreover, they suggested that the cognate effect may just be a word frequency effect, wherein cognate words are high-frequency words and noncognates are lowfrequency words. As such, Strijkers et al.’s findings indicate that our participants may activate English translations upon hearing Spanish cognates and this may affect the extent to which foreign stress patterns are encoded and recognized. In our experiments, participants studied Spanish trochaicand iambic-stress cognates (e.g., MANgo and soLAR, respectively). Note that all the English counterparts had trochaic stress (i.e., MANgo, SOlar). By using cognates, we investigated whether the English lexical representations could affect the memorization of the lexical stress patterns of Spanish words. We were particularly interested in observing whether Spanish words, such as loCAL, would be incorrectly recognized when the word LOcal was presented, since LOcal has the same trochaic-stress as in English. The present approach FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 8 The general design of the recognition memory task used in the present study is summarized in Table 1. Participants memorized Spanish cognates with trochaic (e.g., MANgo) and iambic-stress (loCAL) and noncognates with trochaic (SAStre) and iambic (viaJAR) stress. During the recognition phase, test words were presented in three conditions: same-stress, where words had the samestress patterns as were studied; opposite-stress, where the stress was switched (manGO, VIAjar); and nonstudied words (which also included cognates and noncognates, both with trochaic and iambic stress). (Table 1 about here) For ease of exposition, we outline the predictions for the proportion of yes responses here but it should be noted that the general logic should apply similarly for the analysis of response latencies too. Response latencies were measured because chronometric measurements have traditionally been used in the study of the course of lexical access (Strijkers et al., 2010). Lexical access is an automatic process, and reaction time is a better index of automatic activation processes than accuracy (Johnson & Hasher, 1987). Moreover, response latencies are capable of revealing differences between groups that are not evident using accuracy or error analyses (e.g., Ehrich & Meuter, 2009). To determine whether foreign lexical stress is retained in memory and used in the recognition process, the critical comparisons are between performance in the same-stress and opposite-stress conditions. If lexical stress is used, the proportion of yes responses in the samestress condition should be higher than that in the opposite-stress condition. However, if the foreign stress is not used, there should be no difference between the same-stress and opposite-stress conditions, since the segmental information is the same in these two conditions. The extent to which there is a native-language (English) bias on lexical stress processing will be examined by the pattern of results with respect to the cognates and noncognates and words with FOREIGN LEXICAL STRESS RECOGNITION 9 trochaic and iambic stress. If activation of the English lexical representation influences the recognition process, yes responses to cognates should be higher and quicker than noncognates, because cognates have an existing lexical representation and a higher word frequency than the (newly learned) noncognates (Strijkers et al., 2010). Similarly, if English suprasegmental similarity has an influence, yes responses should be higher and quicker to trochaic words than to iambic words. Additionally, if both segmental and suprasegmental similarity interact, the strongest influence might be expected for trochaic cognates, since these are the closest match with English words. Two experiments were originally conducted, but they are presented as a single study, since the general pattern of results was similar across both studies. The difference and motivation for the two experiments are described in the procedure subsection below.