ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Perceptual Evidence for Separate Processing of Stress Pattern and Phonemic String

Valérie Pasdeloup, José Morais, Régine Kolinsky

Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, University Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

In order to determine if lexical stress pattern and phonemic string are represented separately at some level of processing, a target word recognition task was used under dichotic listening presentation. Two stimuli were presented simultaneously, one to one ear and one to the other ear. The stimuli are constructed in such a way that, if listeners combine the phonemic string from the stimulus presented to one ear with the stress pattern from the stimulus presented to the other ear, they experience the illusory perception of a word which corresponds to the prespecified target. The results suggest that stress pattern and segmental string can be represented separately at least at a prelexical level.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Pasdeloup, Valérie / Morais, José / Kolinsky, Régine (1993): "Perceptual evidence for separate processing of stress pattern and phonemic string", In Prosody-1993, 220-223.