Stress assignment to polysyllabic words is the only aspect of the pronunciation of written Italian that cannot be predicted by rule. It could be a function of stress dominance in the language or of stress neighborhood (i.e., the number of words sharing an ending and a stress pattern). In two experiments, we investigated stress assignment in Italian adult and, most importantly, young readers. Wo...

In this paper we describe the SSI algorithm, a structural pattern matching algorithm for WSD. The algorithm has been applied to the gloss disambiguation task of Senseval-3.

This study demonstrates some new aspects of preboundary lengthening and preaccentual shortening on a test word banana in American English. Preboundary lengthening was found to be extended to the initial unstressed syllable beyond the main-stressed syllable, presenting more complexity than has previously been assumed. Preaccentual shortening was observed regardless of boundary strength or the st...

Several populations, such as normally developing children around the age of two years, children with language impairments, and adults with aphasia, all share a similar documented phenomenon in their language production: omitting syllables from their speech. Omitted syllables are most often those that are weakly stressed and that directly precede the primary stress of a word, yielding such stres...

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning conditions, either in children's stories (semantically ri...

Recently we reported that spoken stressed and unstressed primes differently modulate Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of spoken initially stressed targets. ERP stress priming was independent of prime-target phoneme overlap. Here we test whether phoneme-free ERP stress priming involves the lexicon. We used German target words with the same onset phonemes but different onset stress, such as MANdel...

Using cross-modal form priming, we compared the use of stress and lexicality in the segmentation of spoken English by native English speakers (L1) and by native Hungarian speakers of second-language English (L2). For both language groups, lexicality was found to be an effective segmentation cue. That is, spoken disyllabic word fragments were stronger primes in a subsequent visual word recogniti...

We have previously reported on ProPOSEL, a purpose-built Prosody and PoS English Lexicon compatible with the Python Natural Language ToolKit. ProPOSEC is a new corpus research resource built using this lexicon, intended for distribution with the Aix-MARSEC dataset. ProPOSEC comprises multi-level parallel annotations, juxtaposing prosodic and syntactic information from different versions of the ...