Word stress perception of European Portuguese: a study with Hungarian listeners

Description

Although research in L2 phonology is a growing field, studies addressing perceptual acquisition of L2 suprasegmental features, namely word stress, are still scarce. The reason for such scarcity may lie in the complexity of the acoustic cues that interact to signal stress: pitch, duration, intensity, and vowel quality. In European Portuguese (EP), for example, word stress is lexically contrastive, and stress can fall on one of the last three syllables of a word. The main cue to stress is vowel reduction [1]-[3] and, in its absence, duration. However, if stress falls on the penultimate syllable – which is the regular stress, unmarked pattern in the language –, no systematic acoustic cues are displayed [1]. Such language-specific stress properties are rarely studied from a language acquisition perspective, and few studies have attempted to investigate this topic in L2 phonological acquisition [4].
Previous research has shown that speakers of non-contrastive stress languages, such as Hungarian – a syllable-timed language with fixed stress on the first syllable [5] – display ‘deafness’ in the perception of stress contrasts [6]-[8]. These studies report stress ‘deafness’ as being general and pervasive in non-contrastive stress languages. The present study aims at observing if stress ‘deafness’ is uniformly displayed by speakers of non-contrastive stress languages learning a lexical stress language or, on the contrary, it is affected by specific stress patterns of the L2.
To this purpose, we recruited Hungarian native speakers with no previous contact with EP (n = 117), as well as Portuguese native speakers, to control for stimuli nativeness (n = 12). Participants were aged 18-45, and none reported hearing impairments. We conducted an oddity discrimination task, with CVCVCV pseudowords retrieved from Correia et al. [3], produced by two female and one male EP native speakers. Stimuli included the vowels [i] and [u], the only EP vowels which do not undergo vowel reduction in unstressed position. Trials included sequences of tokens in the following conditions: stress on the 1st syllable (e.g., [ˈdutiku]), 2nd syllable (e.g., [duˈtiku]), 3rd syllable (e.g., [dutiˈku]), 1st vs. 2nd syllable (e.g.,[ˈdutiku]-[duˈtiku]), and 2nd vs. 3rd syllable (e.g., [duˈtiku]-[dutiˈku]). Following previous studies [3], [6]-[8], we also included consonantal contrasts, as a baseline condition (e.g., [buˈpili]/[buˈʃili]). The experiment was built and hosted online in Gorilla Experiment Builder [9] and each participant completed 123 trials, randomly presented between participants.
A linear mixed-effects logistic model showed that L1 was a significant factor (χ2 (1) = 7.67, p < .001), with Hungarian listeners presenting more difficulties than the Portuguese participants. Moreover, Hungarian listeners performed significantly worse in the stress contrast than in consonantal contrast condition (p < .001), confirming a stress ‘deafness’ effect reported in previous studies. A significant interaction L1*stress position (χ2 (2) = 21.83, p < .001) was also found (Figure 1), showing that the performance of Hungarian
listeners varied as a function of stress position. Pairwise comparisons confirmed that Hungarian listeners did not perform significantly differently than Portuguese participants when stress was placed in the 1st syllable or in the 3rd syllable. These results can be explained in light of EP word stress properties, since stress on the 2nd syllable does not carry prominence, thus leading to additional difficulties in stress perception by Hungarian speakers. Furthermore, the results obtained confirm that stress ‘deafness’ does not work across-the-board and that, as with other phonological properties, stress perception is a result of the interaction between the properties of the L1 and the L2.
With the present study we aim at contributing to a better insight into L2 word stress perception, particularly the importance of language-specific patterns in stress ‘deafness’. The findings will be discussed considering their possible application in the design of didactic tasks for L2 Portuguese.

Period	23 Oct 2024
Event title	Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística
Event type	Conference
Conference number	40
Location	Ponta DelgadaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National