• In an attempt to find out which of the two Swedish prosodic contrasts of 1) word stress pattern and 2) tonal word accent category has the greatest communicative weight, a lexical decision experiment was conducted: in one part word stress pattern was changed from trochaic to iambic, and in the other part trochaic accent II words were changed to accent I. Native Swedish listeners were asked to decide whether the distorted words were real words or ‘non-words’. A clear tendency is that listeners preferred to give more ‘non-word’ responses when the stress pattern was shifted, compared to when word accent category was shifted. This could have implications for priority of phonological features when teaching Swedish as a second language.

Subject headings

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

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

Keyword

prosody

word accent

word stress

recognition

Utbildning och lärande

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)