Across a variety of tasks, adults respond differently to syllables with multiple stress cues than to syllables with only one cue to stress. This series of experiments was designed to explore how infants and adults use partial stress as a cue to word boundaries. In the first experiment, 9-month-old infants treated syllables with only one cue to stress (spectral tilt) as a strong cue to word boun...

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Hall e & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical items than to a phonetically comparable rare l...

Please cite this article in press as: Yap, M ory and Language (2009), doi:10.1016/j.jm The visual word recognition literature has been dominated by the study of monosyllabic words in factorial experiments, computational models, and megastudies. However, it is not yet clear whether the behavioral effects reported for monosyllabic words generalize reliably to multisyllabic words. Hierarchical reg...

This study examines English-speaking children's truncation patterns (i.e., syllable deletion patterns) in multisyllabic words to determine if they are consistent with metrical constraints or perceptual biases. It also examines segmental influences on children's truncations. Children, age 22-34 months, produced three-syllable novel and real words and four-syllable real words, which varied across...

We tested German nine-month-olds' reliance on pitch and metrical stress for segmentation. In a headturn-preference paradigm, infants were familiarized with trisyllabic words (weak-strong-weak (WSW) stress pattern) in sentence-contexts. The words were presented in one of three naturally occurring intonation conditions: one in which high pitch was aligned with the stressed syllable and two misali...

For both human and automatic speech recognizers it is difficult to segment continuous speech into discrete units such as words. Word segmentation is so hard because there seem to be no self-evident cues for word boundaries in the speech stream. However, it has been suggested that English listeners can profit from the occurrence of full vowels (i.e. vowels with metrical stress) in the speech str...

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...

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word reading and non-word repetition tasks. Unlike the...

This current edition of the annual review of new developments in the field of "stress" follows the pattern of the previous ones. The first hundred pages are occupied by a summary of the concept of "stress" as developed by Selye and his colleagues. A great deal of this repeats material from previous editions, some of it word for word. A series of nine review articles is then inserted. These incl...

This current edition of the annual review of new developments in the field of "stress" follows the pattern of the previous ones. The first hundred pages are occupied by a summary of the concept of "stress" as developed by Selye and his colleagues. A great deal of this repeats material from previous editions, some of it word for word. A series of nine review articles is then inserted. These incl...