Monitoring metrical stress in polysyllabic words
This study investigated the monitoring of metrical stress information in
internally generated speech. In Experiment 1, Dutch participants were asked
to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results
showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g.,
KAno ‘‘canoe’’) than for targets with final stress (e.g., kaNON ‘‘cannon’’;
capital letters indicate stressed syllables). It was demonstrated that
monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object
recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the
outcome of the first experiment with trisyllabic picture names. These results
are similar to the findings of Wheeldon and Levelt (1995) in a segment
monitoring task. The outcome might be interpreted to demonstrate that
phonological encoding in speech production is a rightward incremental
process. Alternatively, the data might reflect the sequential nature of a
perceptual mechanism used to monitor lexical stress.
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