A Psycholinguistic Study of English Stress Assignment Rules

Two studies of stress assignment rules are reported. In both studies speakers found to base their pronunciations partly on general rules and partly on comparisons with particular English words: word length, syntactic category and position of primary stress all influenced performance. In the second study, the distinctions between pronounced polysyllabic nonsense words, and similarity to real English words, as well as phonemic and syntactic structure, was controlled. In the first study, speakers were lax and tense vowels, and strong and weak clusters, which are central to Chomsky and Halle's (1968) formulation of stress assignment rules, were found to influence performance, but not only in the ways predicted by Chomsky and Halle. A probabilistic performance model is proposed: part of this model incorporates Chomsky and Halle's rules, but other linguistic influences are also taken into account.