Lexical stress perception of German morphologically complex words by Italian speakers

Previous research has shown that Italian speakers have difculties in learning the correct lexical stress of German morphologically complex words. To test if this difculty is of perceptual origin, we employed the method by Dupoux et. al 2001 [7], consisting in a short-term memory sequence repetition task. We tested the participants with a stress contrast, a phoneme contrast, which constituted the baseline, and a stress+quantity contrast, which should correspond to an Italian stress pattern, in which duration plays a role. We also tested a control group of German subjects. As expected, the Italian subjects performed worse on stress contrast than on phoneme or stress+quantity contrasts. The German subjects performed equally well on all contrasts, except for the stress contrast of words with long penultimate syllable, in which their error rate was comparable to that of Italian subjects.