Processing Danish nouns with stød-alternating stems

Stød is a syllable rhyme prosody that is realized as creaky voice, and its distribution is partly predictable. To examine listeners’ implicit knowledge of the complicated nature of stød distribution, we conducted a lexical decision task, investigating an irregularly behaving group of nouns in which stød distribution is unpredictable. We hypothesized that listeners would be the most surprised by deviating prosody in lexemes where all word forms occur with stød, and that they would more often characterize these nouns as non-words in cases of deviating stød. Conversely, we assumed that there would be less strong expectations for words with frequent and grammatically predictable changes in prosody. We found that, on the whole, words pronounced with deviating prosody were reacted to more slowly and were more often judged to be non-words, indicating that listeners rely on stød when accessing the mental representations. Nouns with canonical stød in the plural evoked more non-word responses in the deviating prosody condition compared to words with canonical non-stød. This effect is strongest for the -ene suffix but also visible for -er-ne. This tendency seems to reflect a bias towards of stød connected to a difference in suffix productivity.