Stress Deafness in Tehrani and Kermani Varieties of Persian

Stress deafness is the difficulty in the perception of stress in the speakers of a language which does not deal with its contrastive function (Peperkamp et al., 2010). According to stress deafness typology proposed by Dupoux & Peperkamp (2002), diverse patterns of stress deafness can be related to different phases in which infants make decisions regarding the role stress plays in their ambient language. Within the first two years of life and based on the limited amount of linguistic information, infants are required to evaluate the role of stress to set the stress parameter of their native language (Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2002). If infants discover the regular stress pattern of their ambient language, this will lead to the negative value of this parameter. In contrast, in case of no regular stress pattern, the positive value will be selected, and stress will be regarded as an essential part of the phonological representation of words in the lexicon.Comparing stress deafness in Persian speakers with that of the speakers of Dutch, Japanese, French and Indonesian, Rahmani et al. (2015) have shown that Persian participants performed as poorly as French participants. It seems that in languages such as Persian and French the phonological representation of words is provided with their accent location within the first stages of language acquisition which serves to detect word boundaries. But at later stages, this type of information would not survive in the grammar of the adult speakers, and they are not able to perceive stress.The purpose of the present paper was to replicate the perceptual study conducted by Rahmani et al. (2015) on stress deafness for the Tehrani variety of Persian, which shows the characteristics of a syllable-timed language and compare the results with those obtained from the hearers of the Kermani variety which is known as a stress-timed language.