We investigated whether seeing a pointing gesture influences the perceived lexical stress. A pitch contour continuum between the Dutch words “CAnon” (‘canon’) and “kaNON” (‘cannon’) was presented along with a pointing gesture during the first or the second syllable. Pointing gestures following natural recordings but not Gaussian functions influenced stress perception (Experiment 1 and 2), espec...

Typically developing infants differentiate strong-weak (trochaic) and weak-strong (iambic) stress patterns by 2months of age. The ability to discriminate rhythmical patterns, such as lexical stress, has been argued to facilitate language development, suggesting that a difficulty in discriminating stress might affect early word learning as reflected in vocabulary size. Children with autism spect...

In a study of optical cues to the visual perception of stress, three American English talkers spoke words that differed in lexical stress and sentences that differed in phrasal stress, while video and movements of the face were recorded. In a production analysis, stressed vs. unstressed syllables from these utterances were compared along many measures of facial movement, which were generally la...

The aim of the present study was to compare the processing of lexical stress across modalities in native speakers of English. We utilised the same disyllabic stimuli in both visual and auditory grammatical classification. Participants were asked to classify each individually presented word as being either a noun or a verb as quickly and accurately as possible. In line with previous findings (Ar...

A perception experiment based on systematic variation of disyllabic vowel duration and vowel quality, and of intervocalic fricative duration in the German minimal lexical stress pair 'Kaffee “coffee” vs. Ca'fé (locality) in a low f0 tail or a high f0 plateau shows highly significant effects of the 3 variables as cues to lexical stress. The combined vowel quality and fricative variables outweigh...