English speakers' perception of Spanish lexical stress: Context-driven L2 stress perception

English speakers' perception of word-stress in Spanish was compared to that of native Spanish controls. All participants performed a word-stress detection task in Spanish declarative sentences and reporting clauses where the identification of a syllable as stressed or unstressed was dependent of the perception of phonetic detail. Phonetic detail was manipulated by crossing a duration continuum with a pitch continuum in the target words embedded in declarative sentences, and a duration continuum with an intensity continuum in the target words embedded in reporting clauses. Results showed that English speakers did not perceive the variations of duration, pitch and intensity in relation to stress as native Spanish speakers did. When listening to Spanish, English speakers processed the acoustic dimensions to stress by using those pitch patterns and cue associations that represented context-appropriate realizations of stress in English. As a result, English speakers experienced difficulties perceiving those tokens that represented context-appropriate realizations of stress in Spanish but not in English. This lead to a context-sensitive ‘stress deafness’ that involved relatively low levels of processing and stress representations with language-specific context-driven phonetic detail. Together with current phonological theories of ‘stress deafness’, the context-sensitive ‘stress deafness’ provides a comprehensive view of this phenomenon.

► Contrary to current studies, English speakers have difficulty perceiving Spanish stress.
► They misperceive only those instances of Spanish stress that are uncommon in English.
► This occurs because they process L2 with L1 context-sensitive cue-preferences.
► L2 stress perception involves stress representations rich in phonetic detail as well as relatively low-level perception processes.