The legal principle of accession suggests that people sometimes extend ownership a prominent item to related objects, resources, and benefits. For example, might assume whoever owns large land mass is also likely possess surrounding islands. In three experiments on 4–7-year-olds (N = 526) adults 498), we find prominence affects inductive inferences about both liking. Experiment 1, children were...

Importance and predictability each have been argued to contribute to acoustic prominence. To investigate whether these factors are independent or two aspects of the same phenomenon, naïve participants played a verbal variant of Tic Tac Toe. Both importance and predictability contributed independently to the acoustic prominence of a word, but in different ways. Predictable game moves were shorte...

In this letter, we present useful features accounting for pronunciation prominence and propose a classification technique for prominence detection. A set of phone-specific features are extracted based on a forced alignment of the test pronunciation provided by a speech recognition system. These features are then applied to the traditional classifiers such as the support vector machine (SVM), ar...

The inference of causality is a crucial cognitive ability and language processing is no exception: recent research suggests that, across different languages, the human language comprehension system attempts to identify the primary causer of the state of affairs described (the "actor") quickly and unambiguously (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2009). This identification can take place ve...

Prosodic transfer is a rich area of research for second language acquisition (SLA), encompassing multiple aspects of a speaker’s production (Archibald 1997, 2006, Goad & White 2006, Gut 2003, Barry 2007, inter alia). In the research reported here we are particularly interested in the L2 acquisition of main sentence prominence or nuclear stress (NS), regarding how the L1 (Spanish) and the L2 (En...