To the best of our knowledge, this is by far the first phonetic study on Kanakanavu, an endangered Austronesian language spoken in southern Taiwan. A disyllabic word pair only differs in stress position was recorded from four native speakers. Tone type and corresponding acoustic correlates were analyzed. Results showed that lexical stress is realized with ample prosodic patterns when it is on p...

Words bearing high stress appear to be easier to process during sentence comprehension. Since sentence stress typically falls on content words this suggests that comprehension is organized according to a form class bias: process stressed items as content words. The present study measured reaction-time (RT) to word-initial phoneme targets on content and function words in sentence contexts. Half ...

Theories of English phonology regard syllable onset patterns as irrelevant to the assignment of lexical stress. This paper describes three studies that challenge this position. Study 1 tested whether stress patterns on a large sample of disyllabic English words varied as a function of word onset. The incidence of trochaic stress increased significantly with the number of consonants in word onse...

As suggested by Currie, we apply the probabilistic method to problems regarding pattern avoidance. Using techniques from analytic combinatorics, we calculate asymptotic pattern occurrence statistics and use them in conjunction with the probabilistic method to establish new results about the Ramsey theory of unavoidable patterns in the full word case (both nonabelian sense and abelian sense) and...

Spoken utterances contain few reliable cues to word boundaries, but listeners nonetheless experience little difficulty identifying words in continuous speech. The authors present data and simulations that suggest that this ability is best accounted for by a model of spoken-word recognition combining competition between alternative lexical candidates, and sensitivity to prosodic structure. In a ...

This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha [shower], ciuDAD [city]; stressed syllables in capital letters) and subsequently performed a recognition task, in which studied words were presented with the same lexical stress pattern (DUcha) or the opposite lexical stress...

1 Introduction Many languages systematically avoid stressing final syllables. This dispreference for final stress can be seen both in languages with weight-insensitive stress and those with weight-sensitive stress. For example, many languages with weight-insensitive stress, e.g. Nahuatl (Wolgemuth 1981), Polish (Comrie 1976), regularly stress the penultimate syllable, the syllable closest to th...

Infants born prematurely are at higher risk for later linguistic deficits present in delayed or atypical processing of phonetic and prosodic information. In order to be able to specify the nature of this atypical development, it is important to investigate the role of early experience in language perception. According to the concept of Gonzalez-Gomez and Nazzi (2012) there is a special intraute...

This paper describes AliQAn, a monolingual open-domain Question Answering (QA) System developed in the Department of Language Processing and Information Systems at the University of Alicante for CLEF-2005 Spanish monolingual QA evaluation task. Our approach is based fundamentally on the use of syntactic pattern recognition in order to identify possible answers. Beside, Word Sense Disambiguation...