An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version, the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact...

The acoustic properties of word stress have been explored in a number of studies. However, there is little research on German word stress, and even less on its realization in spontaneous speech. This paper tests whether parameters that have been found to implement word stress in mostly laboratory speech are also employed in a corpus of German spontaneous speech. Specifically, we consider spectr...

In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem ‘augments’ is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) “Principle of Metrical Coherence” and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic appli...

In this paper, we study pattern-avoidance in the set of words over the alphabet [k]. We say that a word w ∈ [k] contains a pattern τ ∈ [l], if w contains a subsequence order-isomorphic to τ . This notion generalizes pattern-avoidance in permutations. We determine all the Wilf-equivalence classes of word patterns of

Recent corpus-based work on word sense disambiguation explores the application of statistical pattern recognition procedures to lexical co-occurrence data from very large text databases. In this paper we argue for a linguistically principled approach to disambiguation, in which relevant contextual clues are narrowly defined, in syntactic and semantic terms, and in which only highly reliable clu...

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also...

Eight experiments tested the hypothesis that infants' word segmentation abilities are reducible to familiar sound-pattern parsing regardless of actual word boundaries. This hypothesis was disconfirmed in experiments using the headturn preference procedure: 8.5-month-olds did not mis-segment a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word (e.g., dice) from passages containing the corresponding phonemic p...

Previous studies have revealed that greater neural pattern similarity across repetitions is associated with better subsequent memory. In this study, we used an artificial language training paradigm and representational similarity analysis to examine whether neural pattern similarity across repetitions before training was associated with post-training behavioral performance. Twenty-four native C...

Numerous proposals have been advanced as to how prosodic systems should be typologised. In this paper I distinguish two prototype systems, tone and stress accent, which, unlike systems analysed as ‘pitch accent’, have two inviolable, definitional properties: (i) obligatoriness (every word has at least one stress accent) ; (ii) syllable-dependency (the stress-bearing unit is necessarily the syll...

The paper reports the first study that explicitly distinguishes the phonetic correlates of sentence accents from those of word stress in Finnish (stress acted as the baseline whose correlates as against of stress were not investigated). Sentences were constructed that successfully elicited no accent, moderate accent, and strong accent on target words. The three degrees of prominence were clearl...