抄録
This study examined the impact of rhythmic context on the effects of stress typicality on spoken word recognition by Japanese EFL learners. In English, the majority of disyllabic nouns have trochaic stress, while most disyllabic verbs have iambic stress. The distributional bias is called “stress typicality,” and previous studies show that latencies for recognizing stimuli are smaller when the words are typically stressed. The primary focus of the present study is whether rhythmically controlled sentential contexts surrounding stimuli affect the degree of the effects of stress typicality on L2 spoken word recognition. The alternation of strong and weak syllables is preferable in English rhythmic structure, and this preference affects the stress assignment for pseudowords. Thus, it is highly probable that rhythmic context affects the degree of the effects of stress typicality. Specifically, it might be easier to recall trochaic words when the stimulus is preceded by a weak syllable due to the tendency to maintain the optimal rhythmic structure. However, the results indicated that syntactic contexts negated the effects of rhythmic contexts rather than produced synergistic effects. The role of phonological information might thus be supportive rather than crucial. This does not mean that the information does not have any impact, but it is possible that it has the supportive effects of facilitaing the recall of answer candidates.
