Lexical Effects in the Use of Word-Level Stress for Word Recognition by English and Korean Learners of Spanish.

Abstract

The reliance on suprasegmental information for word recognition varies among languages: While Spanish uses only suprasegmental cues to word-level stress (e.g., PApa ‘potato’ vs. paPÁ ‘father’), English uses both segmental and suprasegmental cues (e.g., REcord vs. reCORD), and Korean does not have lexical stress. Unclear is whether L2 learners of Spanish can make use of suprasegmental cues to recognize stress and how lexical information influences word recognition. Advanced English and Korean L2 learners of Spanish completed a cross-modal word-identification task. They heard semantically ambiguous sentences that ended with incomplete fragments, and they were asked to choose the word corresponding to the fragment heard. Results showed that all learners can make use of stress as a cue for word recognition, but Korean learners seem to be more influenced by their L1 prosodic structure. While other analyses are undergoing, L2 proficiency has shown to lead to more native-like results.