{"title":"Relative importance of stress correlates in native listeners’ identification of Spanish lexical stress produced by monolingual and bilingual speakers","authors":"Ji Young Kim","doi":"10.1016/j.wocn.2025.101418","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Spanish has many minimal stress pairs, and lexical stress in Spanish is marked primarily via suprasegmental cues. Thus, sensitivity to suprasegmental information is crucial for spoken-word identification in Spanish. Using stimuli produced by speakers of Mexican Spanish with varying language learning experience (i.e., monolingual speakers, heritage speakers, L2 learners), this study examines native listeners’ identification of Spanish lexical stress under enhanced variability in phonetic cues. Our data demonstrate that listeners exploit various stress correlates in the speech signal and assign different weights to them, which is context-specific; when there is a pitch accent, native listeners mainly attend to f0-related cues, whereas in the absence of a pitch accent, intensity plays a stronger role. Our data also show that clustering based on stress correlates is not consistent with the predetermined monolingual-heritage-L2 group division, which indicates that language learning experience alone is not sufficient to explain how Spanish speakers mark stress. This study highlights the importance of incorporating variable speech data in speech perception research and adopting a data-driven, individual-centered approach to speaker grouping in cross-sectional studies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51397,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Phonetics","volume":"111 ","pages":"Article 101418"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9000,"publicationDate":"2025-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Phonetics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447025000294","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Spanish has many minimal stress pairs, and lexical stress in Spanish is marked primarily via suprasegmental cues. Thus, sensitivity to suprasegmental information is crucial for spoken-word identification in Spanish. Using stimuli produced by speakers of Mexican Spanish with varying language learning experience (i.e., monolingual speakers, heritage speakers, L2 learners), this study examines native listeners’ identification of Spanish lexical stress under enhanced variability in phonetic cues. Our data demonstrate that listeners exploit various stress correlates in the speech signal and assign different weights to them, which is context-specific; when there is a pitch accent, native listeners mainly attend to f0-related cues, whereas in the absence of a pitch accent, intensity plays a stronger role. Our data also show that clustering based on stress correlates is not consistent with the predetermined monolingual-heritage-L2 group division, which indicates that language learning experience alone is not sufficient to explain how Spanish speakers mark stress. This study highlights the importance of incorporating variable speech data in speech perception research and adopting a data-driven, individual-centered approach to speaker grouping in cross-sectional studies.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Phonetics publishes papers of an experimental or theoretical nature that deal with phonetic aspects of language and linguistic communication processes. Papers dealing with technological and/or pathological topics, or papers of an interdisciplinary nature are also suitable, provided that linguistic-phonetic principles underlie the work reported. Regular articles, review articles, and letters to the editor are published. Themed issues are also published, devoted entirely to a specific subject of interest within the field of phonetics.