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This research examines (standard Mandarin) Chinese and (Seoul) Korean listeners’ use of segmental and suprasegmental cues to stress in English word recognition. In English, both segmental (vowel reduction) and suprasegmental (fundamental frequency, duration, intensity) information signal stress and constrain lexical access [1,2]. In addition to having lexical tones, Chinese has full-full and full-reduced words that differ in stress placement (1), with both segmental and suprasegmental cues signaling stress [3,4]. By contrast, Seoul Korean does not have lexical tones or word-level stress [5,6]. Lin et al. [7] showed that Korean listeners were less accurate than Chinese listeners in using stress to recognize English words/non-word. The present study examines the time course with which these listeners use segmental and suprasegmental cues to English stress. Intermediate-to-advanced Chinese- and Korean-speaking late second-language learners of English and native English listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment. In each trial, participants saw a target (parrot), one of two competitors (stress match: parish; stress mismatch: parade), and two unrelated distracters, and they heard the target embedded in the carrier sentence Click on_____. The experiment included a vowel-reduction condition, where segmental and suprasegmental information distinguished the first syllable of the target and competitor (parrot-parade), and a no-vowel-reduction condition, where only suprasegmental information distinguished the first syllable of the target and competitor (mystic-mistake). Words were presented orthographically and controlled for length and frequency. Competitors were also controlled for the orthography of the first syllable. Growth-curve analyses on the results of 30 English listeners indicate that fixations in the stress-match condition were lower and had a steeper U-shape than fixations in the stress mismatch condition

This study investigates whether the presence of lexical stress in the native language (L1) determines second-language (L2) learners’ ability to use stress in L2 lexical access. It focuses on (standard Mandarin) Chinese and (Seoul) Korean listeners’ (and native English listeners’) use of segmental and suprasegmental cues to stress in English word recognition. Stress placement in English is signaled by segmental (vowel reduction) and suprasegmental (fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity) cues. Chinese has full-full and full-reduced words that differ in stress placement, with segmental and suprasegmental cues signaling stress. By contrast, Korean does not have lexical stress. Participants completed an eye-tracking experiment. They heard stimuli containing a target word with initial stress (parrot), and saw four orthographic words in the display, including the target and one of two competitors (stress match: parish; stress mismatch: parade). The first syllable of the target and stress-mismatch competitor differed in both segmental and suprasegmental information (parrot-parade) or only in suprasegmental information (mystic-mistake). Growth-curve analyses on fixations revealed that only Chinese and English listeners used stress to recognize English words, confirming L1 effects on the use of stress in L2 lexical access. Furthermore, only English listeners made greater use of stress in the presence of vowel reduction.