On French listeners’ ability to use stress during spoken word processing

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stress pattern in French, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/ʒuʁi/-/ʒu’ʁi/), (2) an illegal stress location pattern, namely words that bore primary stress on their first syllable compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/’ʒuʁi/-/ʒu’ʁi/) and (3) an illegal pattern that involves an unstressed word, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their first syllable (/ʒuʁi/-/’ʒuʁi/). In an ABX task, participants heard three items produced by three different speakers and had to indicate whether X was identical to A or B. The stimuli A and B varied in stress (/ʒu’ʁi/-/ʒuʁi/-/ʒu’ʁi/), in one phoneme (/ʒu’ʁi/-/ʒu’ʁɔ˜/-/ʒu’ʁi/) or in both stress and one phoneme (/ʒu’ʁi/-/ʒuʁɔ˜/-/ʒu’ʁi/). The results showed that French listeners are fully able to discriminate between two words differing in stress provided that the stress pattern included an unstressed word. More importantly, they suggest that the French listeners’ difficulties mainly reside in locating stress within words.