The objectives of this study are (a) to determine if native speakers of Canadian French at different English proficiencies can use primary stress for recognizing English words and (b) to specify how the second language (L2) learners' (surface-level) knowledge of L2 stress placement influences their use of primary stress in L2 word recognition. Two…

Discusses a word-onset gating technique to investigate the role of prosody in word recognition. Subjects were asked to identify words based on onsets followed by information about full word prosody. Results showed that words were correctly recognized with significantly less segmental onset information when word prosody was available. (Author/VWL)