Der kairo-arabische Wortakzent im Vergleich zum Deutschen: eine EEG-Untersuchung

This work presents neurolinguistic data on word stress perception in Cairene Arabic in comparison to German, polnish and Turkish. The aim of the present Work/experiment is to test whether i) native speakers of Cairene Arabic are sensitive to stress manipulations and ii) whether the processing of stress manipulations is influenced by the foot structure. An ERP study on Cairene Arabic is reported whose results are compared with results of previous studies on German, polnisch and Turkish. In all studies, a stress violation paradigm was used to investigate the factors predictability of stress and foot structure: Turkish stress is predictable and fixed to the final syllable, German stress is non-predictable and dependent on foot structure, and stress in Cairene Arabic is predictable and strictly dependent on foot structure. The results of the three experiments show that, besides the predictability of word stress, for Cairene Arabic and German, but not for Turkish and polnish, the internal structure of prosodic words in terms of feet determines the prosodic processing. In the former two languges, feet are important entities within the phonological system, relating phonological and morphological processes to the foot level.