Article published in:
Neural Correlates of Lexical Processing[The Mental Lexicon 8:2] 2013
► pp. 164–194
The lexical representation of word stress in Russian
Evidence from event-related potentials
Ulrike Domahs | Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany / Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur, Universität zu Köln, Germany
Johannes Knaus | Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany / Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures, University of Calgary, Canada
Richard Wiese | Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
This paper explores the processing of metrical structure in Russian, a language with free lexical stress. According to the existing theoretical accounts, not all Russian stems are specified for accent in the lexicon. The present study employs event-related potentials (ERPs) to find evidence to support the underlying distinction into accented and unaccented stem types. The results of two EEG experiments using a stress violation paradigm reveal that Russian listeners are highly sensitive to changes of metrical structure and that prosodic manipulations may impede lexical retrieval. In the first experiment, in which the stimuli were not given prior to auditory presentation, metrical violations evoked a pronounced N400 effect for all stem types, and a late positivity for one of the stem types, indicating a difference in stress processing. In the second experiment in which the stimuli were visually introduced before auditory presentation, stress shifts to the second syllable induced late positive component (LPC) indicating an ease in the evaluation of the metrical form. Overall, the present findings partially support the division into lexically specified and unspecified Russian accent types. In addition, the results show a strong correlation between the patterning of ERP components and the direction of stress shift, suggesting a trochee to be the default foot type in Russian.
Keywords: event-related potentials, Russian, lexical stress, prosodic processing
Published online: 15 November 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.8.2.03mol
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.8.2.03mol
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