15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to
prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns,
picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable.
Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a
different stress (e.g., WORtel - Motor vs. koSTUUM - Motor; capital
letters indicate stressed syllables in prime - target pairs). Furthermore,
half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were
unrelated.
In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was
found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An
additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster
response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic
words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress
pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic
stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical
stress rules of Dutch.
Bibliographic reference. Levelt, Clara C. / Schiller, Niels O. / Fikkert, Paula (2003): "Metrical priming in speech production", In ICPhS-15, 2481-2484.