Dimensions of Phonological Stress

Top researchers explore the nature of stress and accent patterns in languages, especially the nature of their representations and how people learn them.

Jeffrey Heinz (Edited by), Rob Goedemans (Edited by), Harry van der Hulst (Edited by)

9781107102811, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2016

344 pages, 42 b/w illus. 20 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

Stress and accent are central, organizing features of grammar, but their precise nature continues to be a source of mystery and wonder. These issues come to the forefront in acquisition, where the tension between the abstract mental representations and the concrete physical manifestations of stress and accent is deeply reflected. Understanding the nature of the representations of stress and accent patterns, and understanding how stress and accent patterns are learned, informs all aspects of linguistic theory and language acquisition. These two themes - representation and acquisition - form the organizational backbone of this book. Each is addressed along different dimensions of stress and accent, including the position of an accent or stress within various prosodic domains and the acoustic dimensions along which the pronunciation of stress and accent may vary. The research presented in the book is multidisciplinary, encompassing theoretical linguistics, speech science, and computational and experimental research.

Introduction Jeffrey Heinz, Rob Goedemans and Harry van der Hulst
1. Metrical incoherence: diachronic sources and synchronic analysis Matthew Gordon
2. The role of phenomenal accent Brett Hyde
3. Foot alignment in Spanish secondary stress Eugene Buckley
4. The interaction of metrical structure and tone in standard Chinese Yanyan Sui
5. Prominence, contrast and the functional load hypothesis: an acoustic investigation Irene Vogel, Angeliki Athanasopoulou and Nadya Pincus
6. Iquito: the prosodic colon and evaluation of OT stress accounts Nina Topintzi
7. Investigating the efficiency of parsing strategies for the gradual learning algorithm Gaja Jarosz
8. Covert representations, contrast, and the acquisition of lexical accent B. Elan Dresher
9. One or many? In search of the default stress in Greek Anthi Revithiadou and Angelos Lengeris
10. The development of rhythmic preferences by Dutch-learning infants Brigitta Keij and René Kager
11. Acoustic characteristics of infant-directed speech as a function of prosodic typology Yuanyuan Wang, Amanda Seidl and Alejandrina Cristia.

Subject Areas: Computational linguistics [CFX], Phonetics, phonology [CFH], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]