A majority of English words are stressed on their first syllable. Infants use stress as a cue to word segmentation, but it is unclear how infants discover the correlation between stress and word boundaries. We exposed English-learning infants to a list of words stressed on their second syllable to discover whether infants can learn a new relation between stress and word boundaries. English-lear...

Several behavioral studies have suggested that speakers of languages with variable stress (e.g., Spanish) are better than speakers of languages with fixed stress (e.g., French) at discriminating stress contrasts. European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. However, when the vowel quality cue is absent, native speake...

Recent research in verbal learning has produced considerable evidence on the importance of natural language parameters such as syntax, semantic meaning, and word-order in learning and retention of meaningful verbal materials. To test the effect of rhyme and meter on the acquisition and retention of four-word sentences, three levels of meter were used: iambic, trochaic, and mixed (iambic and tro...

The iambic-trochaic law describes humans' tendency to form trochaic groups over sequences varying in pitch or intensity (i.e., the loudest or highest sounds mark group beginnings), and iambic groups over sequences varying in duration (i.e., the longest sounds mark group endings). The extent to which these perceptual biases are shared by humans and nonhuman animals is yet unclear. In Experiment ...

In the development of metrical stress theory, several influential approaches (Hayes 1985, 1987, 1995; McCarthy and Prince 1986; Prince 1990) have employed the Iambic– Trochaic Law (ITL) to provide extralinguistic grounding for an account of the differences between iambic and trochaic stress systems (see also chapter 39: stress: phonotactic and phonetic evidence; chapter 40: the foot; chapter 41...

In the paper, we describe an algorithm for generating Czech iambic verse and its implementation on a computer. It is a continuation of the work first done in 1972 [6], in which a program generating Czech iambic verse had been developed, written in the programming language Algol-Genius and run on the mainframe SAAB D21 with interesting results. Here, we present a new experiment which is a follow...