The acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress: the role of prosodic constituents

Abstract

This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress (hót dog vs. hot dóg) in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which are 5;4, 7;2, 9;3 and 11;6 and 10 adults) were shown pairs of pictures representing a compound word and the corresponding phrase. They heard a prerecorded tape with the names of the items, and were asked to indicate which one they heard. In addition to 9 real compounds and corresponding phrases, 9 novel compounds were presented (rédcup = invented type of flower vs. red cúp). A gradual increase in overall correct scores until age twelve was found along with a significant effect of real vs. novel compounds (p < 0·001), and an overwhelming tendency for the younger children to prefer compounds regardless of stress. We conclude that the results are due to the slow development of the ability to use prosodic information to override a strong lexical bias.

Knowing what a novel word is not: Two-year-olds ‘listen through’ ambiguous adjectives in fluent speech

“…Cruttenden (1974) found that the ability to use stress to infer semantic contrast does not fully develop until between 7 and 10 years of age. Holdgrafer and Campbell (1986) found a similar developmental delay in the ability to infer that accent marks new rather than given information, and a recent study by Vogel and Raimy (2002) showed that not until age 11 can children use stress patterns to distinguish between pairs of words used as adjective-noun phrases vs. adjective-noun compounds (e.g. hot dog vs. hotdog).…”

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

“…Vogel and Raimy (2002) reported that single nouns and initial compound constituents differ systematically in their prosody (mean duration and mean fundamental frequency). In the series of experiments described by Isel et al (2003) it was suggested that the durational difference between single nouns and initial compound constituents can delay the semantic processing of initial compound constituents.…”

Phonological Domains: Universals and Deviations

“…Finally she shows that, if we accept the Clitic Group, the interpretation of the psycholinguistic experiments with Dutch speakers becomes quite simple, providing psycholinguistic motivation for the proposals suggested by her paper. Incidentally, Vogel and Raimy (2002) also suggest that the Clitic Group is needed to describe the difference between compound stress in English (which takes the Clitic Group as its domain), and phrasal stress (which is based on the Phonological Phrase domain). They suggest that the Clitic Group might be renamed "Composite Group", which allows us to maintain the relatively flat structure of phonology compared to morpho-syntax.…”