Do listeners use lexical stress at an early stage in word learning? Artificial-lexicon studies have shown that listeners can learn new spoken words easily. These studies used nonwords differing in consonants and/or vowels, but not differing only in stress. If listeners use stress information in word learning, they should be able to learn new words that differ only in stress (e.g., BInulo-biNUlo...

Stress is a useful cue for English word segmentation. A wide range of computational models have found that stress cues enable a 2-10% improvement in segmentation accuracy, depending on the kind of model, by using input that has been annotated with stress using a pronouncing dictionary. However, stress is neither invariably produced nor unambiguously identifiable in real speech. Heavy syllables,...

This paper studies how focus, lexical stress and rising boundary tone act on F0 of the last preboundary word. We find that when the word is non focused, the rising boundary tone takes control almost from the beginning of the word and flattens F0 peak of the lexical stress. When the word is focused, the rising boundary tone is only dominant after F0 peak of lexical stress is formed. This peak is...

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...

Listeners perceive high or rising pitch as stressed – at the word and sentence level (high-pitch bias). Since syllables can also be low-pitched, this bias may lead to misinterpretations of stress thus slow down speech comprehension. We investigate effect immediate exposure with high- vs. low-pitched on identification stress. Participants were exposed utterances containing only syllables. In exp...

We show that every binary pattern of length greater than 14 is abelian-2-avoidable. The best known upper bound on the length of abelian-2-unavoidable binary pattern was 118, and the best known lower bound is 7. We designed an algorithm to decide, under some reasonable assumptions, if a morphic word avoids a pattern in the abelian sense. This algorithm is then used to show that some binary patte...

We study pattern avoidance in the context of partial words. The problem of classifying the avoidable binary patterns has been solved, so we move on to ternary and more general patterns. Our results, which are based on morphisms (iterated or not), determine all the ternary patterns’ avoidability indices or at least give bounds for them.

Brlek et al. (2008) studied smooth infinite words and established some results on letter frequency, recurrence, reversal and complementation for 2-letter alphabets having same parity. In this paper, we explore smooth infinite words over n-letter alphabet {a1, a2, · · · , an}, where a1 < a2 < · · · < an are positive integers and have same remainder when divided by n. And let ai = n · qi + r, qi ...

An investigation of the acoustic correlates of word stress in infant polysyllabic vocalization was carried out on the basis of data from 6 German-learning infants between 7 and 36 months of age in order to describe the development of word stress in German. The data were analyzed with respect to duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (f0), as well as vowel quality parameters describing the t...

The central question in the current research is whether the prosodic structure of the first language (L1) influences production of word stress in Dutch as a second language (DSL). In Dutch the position of word stress can be predicted on the basis of phonological and morphological rules, but there are many exceptions to these rules. In the current investigation existing Dutch words were used, va...