The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) accounts for speech rhythm, grouping of sounds as either Iambs-if alternating in duration-or Trochees-if alternating in pitch and/or intensity. The two different rhythms signal word order, one of the basic syntactic properties of language. We investigated the extent to which Iambic and Trochaic phrases could be auditorily and visually recognized, when visual stimul...

Prosody is often attributed a fundamental role in the process of language acquisition, allowing infants to use prosodic cues to begin to acquire the syntactic structures of their language. The Prosodic Bootstrapping process may combine a number of phonological phenomena (e.g., stress, rhythmic units, intonation), and recently, it has been proposed that a Rhythmic Activation Principle integratin...

Typically developing infants differentiate strong-weak (trochaic) and weak-strong (iambic) stress patterns by 2months of age. The ability to discriminate rhythmical patterns, such as lexical stress, has been argued to facilitate language development, suggesting that a difficulty in discriminating stress might affect early word learning as reflected in vocabulary size. Children with autism spect...

Abstract This paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length four tones. In our study, we find that the primary correlate of is duration, whereas intensity plays secondary but statistically significant role. There was no effect on F0 results. We discuss results relation to s...

This paper explores the nature of prosodic phrasing in Kashaya, an endangered language of northern California, as diagnosed by the location of accent. Previous work has reported that iambic feet are constructed across prosodic phrases that can consist of multiple words, but there has been little research into how these pphrases interact with syntactic constituency. We propose an alignment analy...

Listeners are sensitive to the metric structure of words, i.e., an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, in auditory speech processing: Event-related potentials recorded as participants listen to a sequence of words with a consistent metrical pattern, e.g., a series of trochaic words, suggest that participants register words metrically incongruent with the preceding sequence...

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...

Generative linguistics is predicated on a conceptual distinction between the lexicon and the grammar. However in practice, lexical and grammatical acquisition are interdependent: phonotactics are projected in part from the lexicon [17], while the underlying form of a morpheme depends on the pattern of contrast and neutralization determined by the grammar [25]. This paper demonstrates a causativ...

The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, sugg...