Four studies using a variant of the conditioned head turning procedure, in which response latencies to extraneous noises occurring at different junctures within synthetic syllable strings served as the dependent variable, investigated 6and 9-month-old infants’ representations of familiar and novel syllable pairs manifesting diverse rhythmic patterns. Familiar bisyllables tended to be perceived ...

This study investigates the influence of stress grouping on verbal short-term memory (STM). English speakers show a preference to combine syllables into trochaic groups, both lexically and in continuous speech. In two serial recall experiments, auditory lists of nonsense syllables were presented with either trochaic (STRONG-weak) or iambic (weak-STRONG) stress patterns, or in monotone. The acou...

Previous studies of duration variation in syllable constituents have yielded results for Polish which are clear outliers in relation to those for other languages. We report on a study of this issue in the context of TTS development, using a large annotated database. Global and local duration distance measures are applied to phoneme and syllable level units, and generalised iambic and trochaic d...

This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven Catalan-speaking children reveal that maximality constraints a...