For optimal word recognition listeners should use all relevant acoustic information as soon as it comes available. Using printed-word eye tracking we investigated when during word processing Dutch listeners use suprasegmental lexical stress information to recognize words. Fixations on targets such as "OCtopus" (capitals indicate stress) were more frequent than fixations on segmentally overlappi...

We investigate the relationship between vowel quantity and the utilization of formant space in Slovak, and how prosodic variation in speech rate and lexical stress marking affects this relationship. Slovak presents a common five-vowel system with full phonemic quantity contrast for all vowels in all positions. We found that 1) phonemic quantity contrast in Slovak is salient and minimally affect...

This paper presents preliminary findings of an investigation into the realisation of lexical stress in monolingual and bilingual male adolescents from a community in West Wales. Monolingual speakers of Welsh English were compared with bilinguals from Welsh-speaking and English-speaking homes. This allowed us to explore the effects of language contact and individual linguistic experience on the ...

Three experiments investigated the use of lexical stress in auditory word recognition. Speech voicing continua were created in which lexical status resulted in one end-point constituting a real word and the other end a nonword (e.g. diGRESS-tiGRESS, in which digress is a real word, and DIgress-Tigress, in which tigress is a real word). Subjects' identification of the initial segment of these it...

Abstract We consider two asymmetries reported in the literature on word prosodic systems: tendency to allow more contrast nouns than verbs and avoid stress functional material. focus interaction between these tendencies propose a formal mechanism handle this couched Optimality Theory. In case study group of standard Serbo-Croatian varieties that have predictable but contrastive nouns, we develo...

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...

This study investigates the effect of sentence-level prosody on production of English lexical stress, comparing L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups. 4 L1 North American English speakers and 9 L1 Taiwan Mandarin speakers were asked to produce a set of 20 disyllabic and multisyllabic words embedded in three different prosodic contexts: neutral broad focus, at a phrase/sentence bounda...