The relationship between tone pattern and word stress is investigated on different aspects. The distribution of the original tones of the unstressed syllables in disyllabic words, the perception of word stress in utterances and the allocation of sentence stresses within words are analyzed. The results of the analyses coincide quite well, indicating that tone has something to do with the engende...

In an attempt to find out which of the two Swedish prosodic contrasts of 1) word stress pattern and 2) tonal word accent category has the greatest communicative weight, a lexical decision experiment was conducted: in one part word stress pattern was changed from trochaic to iambic, and in the other part trochaic accent II words were changed to accent I. Native Swedish listeners were asked to de...

Word reduction by weak syllable omission is a fairly common phenomenon in several populations, including normally developing children, children with Specific Language Impairment, and adults with aphasia. A recent study (Carter & Clopper, submitted) has shown that normal adults reduce words using strategies similar to those used by the above-mentioned populations and that these strategies vary t...

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by Nazzi and Gopnik (2001), children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose labels differed by their initial consonant (Exp...

In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyl...

A key component of early intervention for children with delayed language acquisition is early assessment. Previous research has shown that English-learning infants’ sensitivity to lexical stress plays a role in their segmentation of words from fluent speech – a critical step to developing a lexicon. This study investigated the possibility that performance on a word stress discrimination task pr...

Infants develop different kinds of long-term linguistic representation as early as in their first year of life. We examined the interaction of early lexical access and prosodic processing. It is proposed that familiar word forms are stored in a protolexicon before linking any concepts to them, enabling early (proto)lexical segmentation from fluent speech. Additionally, previous results strength...

Four experiments employed a priming methodology to investigate different mechanisms of stress assignment and how they are modulated by lexical and sub-lexical mechanisms in reading aloud in Italian. Lexical stress is unpredictable in Italian, and requires lexical look-up. The most frequent stress pattern (Dominant) is on the penultimate syllable [laVOro (work)], while stress on the antepenultim...

Identification of English primary stress in trochaic and iambic words was compared between English native listeners and Japanese listeners in an environment where the two stress patterns were not distinguished by pitch while other acoustic contrasts were kept intact. Native listeners and Japanese listeners showed opposite response patterns when the pitch pattern of the stimuli was made into fla...

Recent findings from English and Russian have shown that grammatical category plays a key role in stress assignment. In these languages, some grammatical categories have a typical stress pattern and this information is used by readers. However, whether readers are sensitive to smaller distributional differences and other morpho-syntactic properties (e.g., gender, number, person) remains unclear...