Dutch listeners' perception of English lexical stress: A cue-weighting approach.

We investigate whether acoustic cue weightings are transferred from the native language to the second language [research question 1 (RQ1)], how cue weightings change with increasing second-language proficiency (RQ2), and whether individual cues are used independently or together in the second language (RQ3). Vowel reduction is a strong cue to lexical stress in English but not Dutch. Native English listeners and Dutch second-language learners of English completed a cue-weighting stress perception experiment. Participants heard sentence-final pitch-accented auditory stimuli and identified them as DEsert (initial stress) or deSSERT (final stress). The stimuli were manipulated in seven steps from initial to final stress, manipulating two dimensions at a time: vowel quality and pitch, vowel quality and duration, and pitch and duration (other dimensions neutralized). Dutch listeners relied less on vowel quality and more on pitch than English listeners, with Dutch listeners' sensitivity to vowel quality increasing with English proficiency but their sensitivity to pitch not varying with proficiency; Dutch listeners evidenced similar or weaker reliance on duration than did English listeners, and their sensitivity to duration increased with proficiency; and Dutch listeners' use of pitch and duration were positively related. These results provide general support for a cue-based transfer approach to the perception of lexical stress.