The Perceptual Weight of Word Stress, Quantity and Tonal Word Accent in Swedish

• When teaching the pronunciation of an additional language, the teacher should know which properties to give high priority and which to give lower priority. The present study aims at ranking the perceptual weight among the three phonemic prosodic contrasts of Swedish, namely word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. In two experiments, native Swedish subjects were presented with several disyllabic sequences; intact words, nonsense words and words that were distorted with respect to the three prosodic contrasts. The distorted words were not members of minimal pairs. In addition to intact words and non-word distractors, subjects heard originally trochaic words pronounced with iambic stress pattern and vice versa, originally /VːC/ words pronounced as /VCː/ and originally accent I words pronounced with accent II and vice versa. Listeners should decide whether the words were real words or not. The result shows that words with changed word accent category were rather easy to identify, words with changed stress pattern harder to identify, and changed quantity category caused most problems.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

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Utbildning och lärande

Education and Learning

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