Running head: Perceiving word stress in foreign-accented English

2 This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect online speech comprehension in British English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /əә/, Dutch speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by suprasegmentals (duration, intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners heard sentences ending in monosyllabic prime fragments- produced by either an English or a Dutch speaker of English- and performed lexical decisions on visual targets. Primes were either stress-matching ('ab ' excised from absurd), stress-mismatching ('ab ' from absence), or unrelated ('pro ' from proper) with respect to the target (e.g., ABSURD). Results showed a priming effect for stress-matching primes only when produced by the English speaker, suggesting that vowel quality is a more important cue to word stress than suprasegmental information. Furthermore, for visual targets with secondary stress that do not require vowel reduction (e.g., CAMPAIGN), resembling the Dutch way to realize stress, there was a priming effect for both speakers. Hence, Dutch-accented English is not harder to understand in general, but it is in instances where the language-specific implementation of lexical stress differs across languages. PACS numbers: 43.71.Sy, 43.71.An, 43.71.Es, 43.71.H