Perception of contrastive bi-syllabic lexical stress in unaccented and accented words by younger and older listeners

Abstract

This study examined the ability of older and younger listeners to perceive contrastive syllable stress in unaccented and Spanish-accented cognate bi-syllabic English words. Younger listeners with normal hearing, older listeners with normal hearing, and older listeners with hearing impairment judged recordings of words that contrasted in stress that conveyed a noun or verb form (e.g., CONduct/conDUCT), using two paradigms differing in the amount of semantic support. The stimuli were spoken by four speakers: one native English speaker and three Spanish-accented speakers (one moderately and two mildly accented). The results indicate that all listeners showed the lowest accuracy scores in responding to the most heavily accented speaker and the highest accuracy in judging the productions of the native English speaker. The two older groups showed lower accuracy in judging contrastive lexical stress than the younger group, especially for verbs produced by the most accented speaker. This general pattern of performance was observed in the two experimental paradigms, although performance was generally lower in the paradigm without semantic support. The findings suggest that age-related difficulty in adjusting to deviations in contrastive bi-syllabic lexical stress produced with a Spanish accent may be an important factor limiting perception of accented English by older people.