Stress placement and word segmentation by Spanish speakers

Several studies have shown that the stress pattern of one's native language is applied to new linguistic stimuli. Regarding the segmentation of artificial synthesized speech, this idea has been supported by experiments with languages where the stress pattern coincides with word boundaries (i.e. English, Finnish and Dutch). In this study, we present data on speech segmentation with native Spanish speakers whose stress pattern would mark the penultimate syllable of words. Results show that to stress the middle syllable of trisyllabic words in an artificial speech stream does not facilitate segmentation as would be predicted. Possible explanations of these results are explored as related to the interaction of statistical and stress cues in speech segmentation.