Use of Prosodic Cues in Speech Segmentation: The Effect of Recent Linguistic Exposure

This research examines the relative influences of native language and recent linguistic exposure on listeners’ use of prosodic cues in artificial-language speech segmentation. We tested listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as cue to word-final boundaries. Participants included French listeners who had spent various amounts of time in the US since their last stay in France, high-proficiency English learners of French who had spent various amounts of time in the US since their last French immersion, and English listeners without functional knowledge of French. The results suggest that recent exposure more accurately predicts listeners’ segmentation accuracy than native language does. Index Terms: speech segmentation, prosodic cues, artificiallanguage learning