The cognitive status of stød

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The Danish prosodic phenomenon stød is associated with a specific range of suffixes including the singular definite suffixes -en and -et. Diachronically, as well as distributionally, stød is related to Swedish/Norwegian accent 1, but unlike accent 1, stød is seen as phonetically and phonologically marked. Keeping in mind the cross-distribution between phonetic/phonological markedness and distributional patterns, we investigate here whether stød is also related to accent 1 when it comes to cognitive markedness. We present the results of a psycholinguistic study in which participants attended to words that were either appropriate combinations of prosody (stød vs. non-stød) and suffix (singular definite -en/-et vs. plural indefinite -e) or mismatches between prosody and suffix. Participants gave slower and more inaccurate responses to mismatches. This effect of mismatch was most pronounced for words with non-stød stems, indicating that the cognitive markedness status of stød corresponds to that of accent 2.
Original languageEnglish
JournalNordic Journal of Linguistics
Volume38
Pages (from-to)163-187
ISSN0332-5865
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2015

ID: 138811441