According to the functional lateralization hypothesis (FLH) the lateralization of speech prosody depends both on its function (linguistic = left, emotional = right) and on the size of the units it operates on (small = left, large = right). In consequence, according to the FLH, lexical stress should be processed by the left (language-dominant) hemisphere, given its linguistic function and small ...

Vowels are lengthened in lexically stressed syllables and also in word-final syllables. Both stress and final-syllable lengthening can assist in word segmentation from continuous speech, but in languages like English, with a preponderance of stress-initial words, lengthening cues may conflict for indicating word boundaries. An analysis of a large corpus of English speech demonstrated that speak...

In this paper I present a range of evidence to support the claim that a prosodic constituent — such as a syllable or foot — can serve as the licenser of marked phonological or morphological structure (cf. Zoll 1996, Beckman 1998). In particular, such a constituent can be strong, and therefore a valid licenser, by virtue of either its inherent prominence, such as stress, or its positional promin...

Recent work in metrical typology within Optimality Theory has emphasised the rhythmic distribution of stress peaks by reference to clashes and lapses, compared to the more central role of foot constituency characteristic of most previous approaches. One consequence of this emphasis has been the introduction of constraints that require reference to non-adjacent objects in the representation, suc...

According to most models of speech production, the planning of spoken words involves the independent retrieval of segments and metrical frames followed by segment-to-frame association. In some models, the metrical frame includes a specification of the number and ordering of consonants and vowels, but in the word-form encoding by activation and verification (WEAVER) model (A. Roelofs, 1997), the...

In many languages, the stress pattern of a complex word resembles the stress of its morphological base or another related word. I refer to this phenomenon as accentual faithfulness (cf. Alderete 1999). A classic example comes from the English word orìginálity, which resembles the accentual profile of its immediate subconstituent oríginal (cf. monomorphemic words like Mèditerránean). This paper ...