If speakers repeat a phrase, their speech tends to be highly rhythmical. In a similar task without repetition, no such rhythmicity was found. This study investigates whether stress predictability, varied between tasks, affects speech rhythm. Results show that a regular speech rhythm emerges in repeated phrases (with highly predictable stress pattern), but not in other tasks without repetition (...

A key component of early intervention for children with delayed language acquisition is early assessment. Previous research has shown that English-learning infants’ sensitivity to lexical stress plays a role in their segmentation of words from fluent speech – a critical step to developing a lexicon. This study investigated the possibility that performance on a word stress discrimination task pr...

Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficu...

We examine the typology of quantityinsensitive (QI) stress systems and ask to what extent an existing optimality theoretic model of QI stress can predict the observed typological frequencies of stress patterns. We find three significant correlates of pattern attestation and frequency: the trigram entropy of a pattern, the degree to which it is “confusable” with other patterns predicted by the m...