Lu Shuang, Severino Cátia, Vigário Marina, Frota Sónia
School of Foreign Languages, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
Center of Linguistics, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
Front Neurosci. 2024 Sep 20;18:1415854. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1415854. eCollection 2024.
European Portuguese (EP) is a language with unpredictable stress. Previous behavioral studies have shown that without vowel reduction EP adult speakers displayed a stress deafness effect akin to that observed in speakers of fixed-stress languages, suggesting that vowel quality may be the primary cue for stress discrimination in EP. However, an event-related potentials (ERPs) study reported that EP adults were able to discriminate stress contrasts pre-attentively in the absence of vowel quality cues. These results seemed to indicate that EP adult speakers may attend to different cues in the attentive and pre-attentive stress perception. Moreover, both the behavioral and ERPs studies have revealed a processing advantage for iambic stress, which could not be predicted by the rhythmic properties of EP, the language-specific weighting of stress correlates, or the frequency distributions of trochaic and iambic stresses in EP. A recent eye-tracking study has found that EP-learning infants at 5-6 months already exhibited an iambic preference in the absence of vowel reduction, manifested by longer looking time at the iambic stress. The present study used a passive oddball paradigm to examine pre-attentive stress perception without vowel quality cues by 5-to-7-month-old EP-learning infants. Results from twenty-two participants showed that both the trochaic and iambic conditions yielded a positive discrimination response (p-MMR). In addition, the iambic condition elicited a prominent late discriminative negativity (LDN) as well as a P3a component. Our findings present the first evidence for reciprocal discrimination of stress patterns in EP-learning infants, showing that, as in adult speakers, stress processing might also differ at the pre-attentive and attentive stages in infants. Importantly, the stress perception ability in EP-learning infants seems to develop asymmetrically, with an advantage for the iambic stress pattern. The present study highlighted the role of language-specific factors that may affect developing stress perception.
欧洲葡萄牙语（EP）是一种重音不可预测的语言。以往的行为研究表明，在没有元音弱化的情况下，说欧洲葡萄牙语的成年 speakers 表现出一种重音失聪效应，类似于在固定重音语言的 speakers 中观察到的情况，这表明元音质量可能是欧洲葡萄牙语中重音辨别的主要线索。然而，一项事件相关电位（ERP）研究报告称，说欧洲葡萄牙语的成年人能够在没有元音质量线索的情况下，在注意力前阶段辨别重音对比。这些结果似乎表明，说欧洲葡萄牙语的成年 speakers 在注意力集中和注意力前的重音感知中可能会关注不同的线索。此外，行为研究和ERP研究都揭示了抑扬格重音的加工优势，这无法通过欧洲葡萄牙语的节奏特性、重音相关因素的语言特定权重或欧洲葡萄牙语中扬抑抑格和抑扬格重音的频率分布来预测。最近一项眼动追踪研究发现，5至6个月大学习欧洲葡萄牙语的婴儿在没有元音弱化的情况下已经表现出对抑扬格的偏好，表现为对抑扬格重音的注视时间更长。本研究使用被动oddball范式，研究5至7个月大学习欧洲葡萄牙语的婴儿在没有元音质量线索的情况下的注意力前重音感知。22名参与者的结果表明，扬抑抑格和抑扬格条件都产生了积极的辨别反应（p-MMR）。此外，抑扬格条件引发了显著的晚期辨别负波（LDN）以及P3a成分。我们的研究结果首次证明了学习欧洲葡萄牙语的婴儿对重音模式的相互辨别，表明与成年 speakers 一样，婴儿在注意力前和注意力阶段的重音加工也可能不同。重要的是，学习欧洲葡萄牙语的婴儿的重音感知能力似乎不对称发展，对抑扬格重音模式具有优势。本研究强调了可能影响重音感知发展的语言特定因素的作用。
