Sabine Gosselke Berthelsen, Lund University

Prosody plays an important role in speech perception. First language listeners can use word-level prosody to distinguish words or predict how they will end. Second language listeners can use prosody in similar ways but with considerably more effort. In this talk, I will focus on an acoustically and distributionally complex prosodic feature of Danish: stød. Based on data from a set of response time studies, I will illustrate whether and how first and second language listeners use the stød to recognise words or predict word endings. Taking into account proficiency and other language-experience-related variables, I look forward to discussing the potential implications for (Danish) second language teaching.