Perception of predictable stress: A cross-linguistic investigation

Previous studies have documented that speakers of French, a language with predictable stress, have difficulty distinguishing nonsense words that vary in stress position solely (stress deafness). In a sequence recall task with adult speakers of five languages with predictable stress (Standard French, Southeastern French, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish) and one language with non-predictable stress (Spanish), it was found that speakers of all languages with predictable stress except Polish exhibited a strong stress deafness, while Spanish speakers exhibited no such deafness. Polish speakers yielded an intermediate pattern of results: they exhibited a weak stress deafness. These findings are discussed in light of current theoretical models of speech perception. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.