Bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses are rare and their existence has been recently called into question (Newlin-Łukowicz 2012). The present paper reports an acoustic study of secondary stress in Ukrainian based on polysyllabic words with lexical stress located at or near the right edge of the word. The results indicate that Ukrainian has an iteration of secondary stresses from the left edge towards the lexical stress, rather than in the opposite direction. This characteristic makes it metrically related to bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses (e.g. Polish), which invalidates the argument against such systems and proves the empirical adequacy of the metrical theories designed to account for these stress patterns.

This paper explores the processing of metrical structure in Russian, a language with free lexical stress. According to the existing theoretical accounts, not all Russian stems are specified for accent in the lexicon. The present study employs event-related potentials (ERPs) to find evidence to support the underlying distinction into accented and unaccented stem types. The results of two EEG experiments using a stress violation paradigm reveal that Russian listeners are highly sensitive to changes of metrical structure and that prosodic manipulations may impede lexical retrieval. In the first experiment, in which the stimuli were not given prior to auditory presentation, metrical violations evoked a pronounced N400 effect for all stem types, and a late positivity for one of the stem types, indicating a difference in stress processing. In the second experiment in which the stimuli were visually introduced before auditory presentation, stress shifts to the second syllable induced late positive component (LPC) indicating an ease in the evaluation of the metrical form. Overall, the present findings partially support the division into lexically specified and unspecified Russian accent types. In addition, the results show a strong correlation between the patterning of ERP components and the direction of stress shift, suggesting a trochee to be the default foot type in Russian.

This paper re-examines theoretical constructs used in the analysis of Russian word stress, employing data from speakers with acquired surface dyslexia, a symptom which is characterised by impaired lexical access and preserved grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules. Russian stems have been traditionally analysed as lexically accented or unaccented, with a default rule deriving surface stress in the latter case. In the study reported here, we found no differences in the production of accented and unaccented stems. Instead, the analysis of errors revealed that the significant factors determining stress placement include stress neighbourhood and stress position. The speakers produced fewer errors in consistently spelled words, and there was a strong tendency to shift stress to the final syllable in consonant-final words, and to the penultimate syllable in vowel-final words. These results indicate that distributional properties play an important role in stress assignment in both accented and unaccented stem types.

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Abstract Recent work suggests that Ukrainian represents a typologically rare bidirectional stress system with internal lapses, i.e. sequences of unstressed syllables in the vicinity of primary stress (Łukaszewicz and Mołczanow 2018a, b). The system is more intricate than the hitherto known bidirectional systems (e.g. Polish), and thus interesting from the theoretical perspective, as it involves interaction between free lexical stress and secondary stresses. Lexical and subsidiary prominence in Ukrainian have been shown to be expressed acoustically in terms of increased duration of the whole syllable. This leaves open the question of the role of classic vowel parameters in shaping prominence effects in this language. The present study fills this gap by investigating vowel duration, intensity, and F0 as potential acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Ukrainian. It focuses on words with primary stress on the fifth syllable. Such words are predicted to have secondary stress on the first and third syllables. The results point to statistically significant lengthening of vowels carrying lexical stress as well as of those in the initial syllable, but not in the third syllable. A possible explanation is that other parameters, e.g. consonant duration, may be crucial in the case of word-internal subsidiary stress in Ukrainian.