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Abstract:
Abstract: English lexical stress assignment is quasiregular.
There are many strong cues to stress placement, including spelling,
phonology and morphology, but there are also many exceptions. To
investigate how knowledge of lexical stress generalizes to novel
strings, we asked native English speakers to read multisyllabic
nonwords aloud. The relative frequency of orthographic neighbors
with antepenultimate stress strongly predicts the proportion of
subjects assigning antepenultimate stress to those nonwords. We
also examined the effect of syllable weight on stress, using
metrical and statistical analyses of the English lexicon to
identify preferences for stress placement. The results indicate
that subjects are also influenced by such metrical factors,
particularly for words in which no strong orthographic cues are
present. The account that emerges from this work is one in which
English speakers use multiple sources of constraint to predict main
word stress. These same cues determine how speakers generalize to
novel forms. This is further investigated in a connectionist
simulation that shows how these cues can be abstracted on the basis
of different phonological properties of the lexicon.
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