Strong and weak syllables in English can be distinguished on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. Critical for deciding between these factors are syllables containing unstressed unreduced vowels, such as the first syllable of automata. In this study 12 speakers produced sentences containing matched sets of words with initial vowels ranging from stressed to reduced, at norm...

This study assumes that the internal structure of vowels consists combination elements which can be iterated. According to previous research, it is also assumed element iteration in Portuguese provides with inherent weight; word-finally, such are stress-attractors. Notwithstanding, has a great amount words unstressed final [u] (i.e., vowel consisting {U}), as case inflected forms nouns and adje...

I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun from that of an unstressed pronoun in the same discourse position. The base preference must be computed in a total pragmatics module including commonsense pre...

This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect on-line speech comprehension in British speakers of English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /ə/, Dutch speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by suprasegmentals (duration and intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners heard s...

This study investigates how the five lexical tones in Thai are realized on primary-, secondary-, and unstressed syllables produced at fast, normal and slow rate. The results revealed that 1) speech rate does not have any significant effect on F0 height, excursion size and F0 peak and valley locations of Thai tones, 2) tones on primary-stressed syllables have a larger excursion size than those o...

Venous return is a major determinant of cardiac output. Adjustments within the venous system are critical for maintaining venous pressure during loss in circulating volume. This article reviews two factors that are thought to enable the venous system to compensate during acute hemorrhage: 1) changes in venous elastance and 2) mobilization of unstressed blood volume into stressed blood volume. W...