Previous research has shown that French subjects, as opposed to Spanish subjects, have difficulties in distinguishing two words that differ only as far as the location of stress is concerned. In French, stress is not contrastive, and French subjects are deaf to stress contrasts. In Experiment 1, we replicate this finding with a new and more powerful paradigm for assessing the perception of stress. With this new method, we obtain a complete separation of the two subject populations. In Experiment 2, we test highly proficient French-Spanish bilinguals with the same paradigm. Our findings are that the performance of individual bilinguals is either French-like or Spanish-like. The factor that best predicts the bilinguals performance is the country in which the subject is born. Consequences for models of bilingualism are discussed.
Cite as: Peperkamp, S., Dupoux, E., Sebastián-Gallés, N. (1999) Perception of stress by French, Spanish, and bilingual subjects. Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999), 2683-2686, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-593
@inproceedings{peperkamp99_eurospeech,
author={Sharon Peperkamp and Emmanuel Dupoux and Núria Sebastián-Gallés},
title={{Perception of stress by French, Spanish, and bilingual subjects}},
year=1999,
booktitle={Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999)},
pages={2683--2686},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-593}
}