Furthermore, a number of aphasic patients have been described showing a dissociation between spared vowel quality and impaired stress processing. A classical finding in aphasic word production is that there are more vowel quality errors in unstressed than in stressed syllables (e.g., ). Te'nor.įurther evidence supporting the autonomy of vowel quality and word stress knowledge comes from clinical observations on brain-lesioned patients. Native speakers of German have not been tested yet, but they should obviously belong to the second class of participants, as there are minimal stress pairs like 'Tenor vs.

Crucially, although French participants have particular problems in remembering stress patterns, their performance in remembering minimal pairs of pseudowords only distinguished by one consonant did not differ from the performance of Spanish participants. More specifically, participants whose native language does not use stress to distinguish between words (e.g., French) perform significantly lower in tasks testing memory for stress patterns than participants whose language does contain minimal stress pairs (e.g., Spanish). Rather, only when increased memory demands come into play, participants display difficulties to remember stress patterns.

The so-called 'stress deafness' investigated by these authors is in fact not a difficulty to perceive and distinguish stressed and unstressed syllable patterns. įindings from Dupoux and colleagues suggest that also on the level of abstract representation vowel quality and stress information may dissociate. However, while both vowel quality and stress can separately contribute to lexical recognition, there is evidence that vowel quality information can be exploited earlier than stress information (e.g., vowel duration, pitch height, and amplitude) due to coarticulation. Isolated syllables bearing a stressed or unstressed pitch contour can influence the processing of subsequently presented targets which have a segmentally identical initial syllable with congruent pitch. For instance, not only minimal stress pairs (i.e., words only differing in their stress position) can be successfully discriminated on the basis of their different stress patterns even isolated syllables excised from such minimal pairs can be reliably assigned to their source words. Moreover, findings from speech perception point to a relatively independent processing of stress and vowel quality information although, of course, the metrical feature 'stress' inevitably has also its vowel quality correlates such as vowel reduction in unstressed syllables (). In particular, speech errors that involve stress exchange such as 'my 'prosodic (pro'sodic) colleagues', though occurring rather rarely, specifically demonstrate a separate encoding stage for word stress. The autonomy of vowel quality and word stress representationsįirst evidence for a relative independence of vowel quality and word stress encoding in speech production came from psycholinguistic research.

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