This study aimed at investigating the effect of visual (Cuisenaire Rods) and auditory nonsensical monosyllables using Pratt speech processing software as teaching techniques on retention of word stress. To this end, 60 high school participants made the two experimental groups of the study each having 30 students on the basis of their proficiency scores on KET (Key English Test). In one experime...

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction pat...

Correct stress placement is important in text-to-speech systems, in terms of both the overall accuracy and the naturalness of pronunciation. In this paper, we formulate stress assignment as a sequence prediction problem. We represent words as sequences of substrings, and use the substrings as features in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) ranker, which is trained to rank possible stress patterns. T...

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...

An event-related brain potentials (ERPs) experiment was carried out to investigate the time course of lexical stress encoding in language production. Native speakers of Dutch viewed a series of pictures corresponding to bisyllabic names which were either stressed on the first or on the second syllable and made go/no-go decisions on the lexical stress location of those picture names. Behavioral ...

Staggered Spondaic (bisyllabic equal stress) Word (SSW) is a dichotic test. The Dichotic listening tests is a behavioural test battery to assess the hemispheric function, inter-hemispheric transfer of information, and development and maturation of auditory nervous system. Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW) is more sensitive for brainstem and cortical lesion. The current investigation was aimed to de...

Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with a clear speech rhythm. Salient, stressed vowels are aligned to rhythmic points within the phrase period. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory; M.R. Jones (1976), Psych. Rev. 83, 323–355) is that listeners attend in particular to speech events at these rhythmic time points. Be...

The study reported in this paper investigated the abilities of Greek speakers with dysarthria to signal lexical stress at the single word level. Three speakers with dysarthria and two unimpaired control participants were recorded completing a repetition task of a list of words consisting of minimal pairs of Greek disyllabic words contrasted by lexical stress location only. Fourteen listeners we...

This paper presents an analysis of the basic primary stress system in Thompson River Salish (TRS), an Interior Salishan language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. The lexical accent system in TRS exhibits a pattern of conflicting directionality: In words with no accented morphemes, stress falls close to the left edge of the prosodic word (PrWd); in words with accented morphemes, stress falls ...