This is an initial study on the acquisition of English word stress by Brazilian Portuguese learners. The results show that incorrect productions typically had penultimate stress. This phenomenon is the focus of our present investigation. Two major factors are likely to be influencing these inaccurate productions: (i) the high frequency of penultimate stress in the firstlanguage lexicon and (ii)...

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-re...

The present study compared the role of metrical stress in comprehension and production of three-year-old children with a familial risk of dyslexia with that of normally developing children. A visual fixation task with stress (mis)matches in bisyllabic words, as well as a non-word repetition task with bisyllabic targets were presented to the control and at-risk children. Results show that the at...

We investigated how repeating metrical templates, i.e., stress priming, and the contextual predictability of stress affect behavior in a word naming task. We measured naming latencies and the phonetic duration of words produced under four different conditions (congruent stress, low predictability; congruent stress, high predictability; incongruent stress, low predictability; incongruent stress,...

The relationship between acoustic stress and information content of words is investigated. On one side, the average acoustic stress is measured for each word throughout each utterance. On the other side an Information Retrieval (IR) index, based on the words frequency throughout the particular spoken sentence and throughout the collection of analyzed spoken sentences, is calculated. The scatter...

ACOUSTIC VOWEL REDUCTION AS A FUNCTION OF SENTENCE ACCENT, WORD STRESS, AND WORD CLASS

Temporal characteristics of Position in Word (PoW) effects in Spanish are investigated in relation to stress and accent. The results show that initial /s/ is lengthened word-initially but only when stress or accent is concomitantly active. This suggests that the PoW effect is conditioned by stress and accent (prominence effects), and the word boundary effect enhances onset durations when combin...

There is a debate in the literature on whether the intelligibility of English second language (L2) speech is more affected, among other things, by incorrect vowel reduction or by incorrect word stress placement. Identifying which features interfere most with intelligibility will assist in selecting what to prioritize in teaching pronunciation. The focus of ...

The aims of this study are (1) to compare the effects of global vocal effort changes on voice source parameters with effects of focus and word stress, (2) to tease apart the influences of subglottal pressure and vocal fold tension by independently varying sentence accent and word stress. Therefore two EGG experiments were carried out. Results on the calculated voice source parameters indicate t...