Testing linguistic stress rules with listeners' perceptions
Wayne A. Lea · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1979
Stress patterns provide information about the wording, phrasal divisions, syntactic categories, and grammatical relations in English sentences. This study attempts to experimentally verify alternative stress rules published by linguists like Chomsky, Halle, Bresnan, Lakoff, and Bolinger. Consistency and rule testing utility were studied for stress perceptions assigned with either three levels (stressed, unstressed, or reduced), a continuum of alternative values, or pairwise comparisons of relative stress levels. Preliminary results from averaging five listeners' three-level assignments indicated that: some expected nuclear (i.e., rising) stress patterns were perceived as falling stress patterns; reduced stress levels occur in subordinate phrases and on repetitive words in coordinate constructions; and sequences of prenominal adjectives have falling stress patterns like compound constructions. These and other results are examined with the other perception techniques, which more directly verify relative stress levels. [Work supported in part by NSF and ARPA.]