148 Thursday, March 15: Poster Abstracts

English lexical stress is of interest as it involves both suprasegmental and segmental cues (reduced vowels). Studies that have explored the role of lexical stress in English have shown that it contributes to spoken word recognition. More specifically, a trochaic stress pattern facilitates target word recognition more than an iambic stress pattern does (e.g., Cutler & Norris, 1988; Cooper, Cutler & Wales, 2002). Though some studies have shown reduced and unreduced unstressed vowels have different effects on the perception of stress (e.g., Fear, Cutler & Butterfield, 1995), most studies have explored the issue by quantifying suprasegmental cues to distinguish stressed syllables from unstressed syllables. The present study investigates how English speakers process lexical stress information with and without vowel quality cues during spoken word recognition, employing an eye tracking methodology. Twenty three English speakers and twenty English speakers participated in two separate eye tracking experiments that had the same experimental design with different sets of stimuli. In both experiments, participants were trained over three sessions to associate drawings of novel ‘aliens ’ with trisyllabic nonword names that had primary stress either in the first or second syllable. The first experiment had full vowels in both stressed and unstressed syllables, whereas the second experiment included the reduced vowel, schwa, in unstressed syllables. After the training session, eye movements were monitored as listeners followed the auditory instruction