Stress Perception in European Portuguese by Naïve Mandarin Listeners

Can listeners whose native language lacks contrastive lexical stress identify stress in an unfamiliar language? We addressed this question with native Mandarin Chinese listeners, whose L1 marks lexical contrasts with tone, and European Portuguese (EP), whose stress system relies mainly on vowel-quality and durational cues. Twenty listeners with no knowledge of Portuguese heard 30 trisyllabic EP words and indicated, for each word, which syllable sounded most prominent. Overall accuracy was modestly but reliably above chance (46.9%; chance = 33.3%), but it was carried almost entirely by words with initial (antepenultimate) stress, and responses showed a strong overall preference for the initial syllable. Once this positional bias was modeled explicitly, relative duration was the only reliable acoustic predictor of listeners’ responses, with an additional contribution of syllable weight, whereas F0 and intensity showed no independent effects; the durational effect was robust to controlling for intrinsic vowel duration. These findings indicate partial, but clearly non-native-like, sensitivity to EP prominence: listeners recruited duration, a prominence cue productive in Mandarin and the main lexical cue remaining in EP for listeners who cannot exploit vowel-quality contrasts, while apparently disregarding F0, which their L1 binds to lexical tone. The results bear on the debate about prominence in Mandarin and show, methodologically, that positional response biases must be modeled before cue weighting can be interpreted.