F0 peaks are a necessary condition for German infants’ perception of stress in metrical segmentation

Abstract

Infants exposed to stress-timed languages have been demonstrated to use the stressed syllable to localize word beginnings. More recently, intonation has been shown to interfere with stress-based segmentation [1, 2]: For instance, stress-based segmentation was limited to accented words with bell-shaped accents that had the f0 peak aligned with the stressed syllable (“medial-peak” accents); segmentation failed when the f0 peak preceded or followed the stressed syllable in the target word’s contour. Here, we test whether metrical segmentation is caused by the f0 peak on the stressed syllable or by the tonal alternation (LHL, bell-shaped contour in [2]). This allows us to probe whether f0 peaks are necessary cues for metrical segmentation. To this end, we replicated Zahner, et al. [2] but used cup-shaped intonation contours on the targets resulting in a tonal alternation in the opposite direction (HLH). Looking times obtained in a head-turn preference experiment showed no evidence of segmentation for the cupshaped contours. This suggests that an f0 peak is a necessary condition for the stressed syllables to be used in stress-based segmentation, at least for German infants.