THE ROLES OF WORD STRESS AND VOWEL HARMONY IN SPEECH SEGMENTATION

Three experiments investigated the role of word stress and vowel harmo ny in speech segmentation. Finnish has fixed word stress on the initia l syllable, and vowels from a front or back harmony set cannot co-occu r within a word. In Experiment 1, we replicated the results of Suomi, McQueen, and Cutler (1997) showing that Finns use a mismatch in vowel harmony as a word boundary cue when the target-initial syllable is uns tressed. Listeners found it easier to detect words such as HYmy in PUh ymy (harmony mismatch) than in PYhymy (no harmony mismatch). In Experi ment 2, words had stressed target-initial syllables (HYmy as in pyHYmy or puHYmy). Reaction times were now faster and the vowel harmony effe ct was greatly reduced. In Experiment 3, Finnish, Dutch, and French li steners learned to segment an artificial language. Performance was bes t when the phonological properties of the artificial language marched those of the native one. Finns profited, as in the previous experiment s, from vowel harmony and word-initial stress; Dutch profited from wor d-initial stress, and French did not profit either from vowel-harmony or from word-initial stress. Vowel disharmony and word-initial stress are thus language-specific cues to word boundaries. (C) 1998 Academic Press.