COMING TO TERMS WITH STRESS - EFFECTS OF STRESS LOCATION IN SENTENCE PROCESSING

The purpose of this research was to determine the role of syllabic str ess in language processing during the early on-line processing of spee ch and later in the representation of a sentence in memory. Experiment 1 used a syllable monitoring task while Experiment 3 used a probe tas k in which subjects heard a sentence and then were asked to determine whether a probe syllable had occurred in the sentence. In the monitori ng task, stressed syllables were detected more rapidly in word-initial position, but unstressed syllables were detected more rapidly in word -final position. Stress facilitation in initial syllables was strongly related to high relative F0, but not to changes in perceived vowel qu ality as assessed in Experiment 2. This pattern is interpreted as evid ence that lexical stress is used on-line to guide lexical access and/o r lexical segmentation. The probe task of Experiment 3 showed stress f acilitation in both positions, indicating that stress is independently retained in the postperceptual representation of a sentence.