Perception of predictable stress: A cross-linguistic investigation

Previous studies have documented that speakers of French, a language with predictable stress, have difficulty distinguishing nonsense words that vary in stress position solely (stress “deafness”). In a sequence recall task with adult speakers of five languages with predictable stress (Standard French, Southeastern French, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish) and one language with non-predictable stress (Spanish), it was found that speakers of all languages with predictable stress except Polish exhibited a strong stress “deafness”, while Spanish speakers exhibited no such “deafness”. Polish speakers yielded an intermediate pattern of results: they exhibited a weak stress “deafness”. These findings are discussed in light of current theoretical models of speech perception.