This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha [shower], ciuDAD [city]; stressed syllables in capital letters) and subsequently performed a recognition task, in which studied words were presented with the same lexical stress pattern (DUcha) or the opposite lexical stress...

Four experiments employed a priming methodology to investigate different mechanisms of stress assignment and how they are modulated by lexical and sub-lexical mechanisms in reading aloud in Italian. Lexical stress is unpredictable in Italian, and requires lexical look-up. The most frequent stress pattern (Dominant) is on the penultimate syllable [laVOro (work)], while stress on the antepenultim...

The study investigates the effect of stress on English word recognition by speakers of lexical tone and lexical pitch accent languages. Two on-line tasks that involved Taiwan Mandarin and Japanese speakers as test subjects and English natives as controls were conducted: (i) a uni-modal lexical decision task and (ii) a cross-modal priming and lexical decision task. It was found that Mandarin and...

Introduction Russian belongs typologically to what are termed non-predictable stress languages (Altmann) or lexical stress languages (Kijak); that is, stress is not phonologically specified, but must be encoded in each word’s lexical representation. Pedagogical materials for beginning learners of Russian indicate the position of stress for virtually all words; the prevalent mechanism for this i...

We investigate the acquisition of Spanish lexical stress by native speakers of Korean. Korean is a language without lexical stress, where rising tone cues prominence at the phrase-level. Spanish, has lexical stress. In a first experiment, we examined the production of pitch correlates of lexical stress. Our Korean participants’ production was similar to that of native Spanish speakers for sente...

This study compared the use of lexical knowledge and stress cues in segmentation by Mandarin second language (L2) of English. Previous research has shown that native English speakers reliably use lexical cues but not stress cues. However, L2 learners may have difficulty using lexical knowledge in segmentation due to their limited vocabulary size. Instead, Mandarin L2 learners may rely on stress...

Primary lexical stress is realised differently in English and Welsh. English lexical stress involves greater vowel duration in the associated syllable, whereas Welsh involves the shortening of the vowel associated with the stressed syllable and the lengthening of the immediately following consonant. Some accounts have suggested that Welsh English also features this long post-stress consonant. T...

The occurrence of lexical exceptions in languages with fixed stress is subject to several crosslinguistic generalizations. These typological facts are explained within a framework of early language acquisition and its consequences for adult speech processing. Under the assumption that lexical exceptions to stress rules can only occur in a language if its native speakers can perceive stress cont...