Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress…

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

In 3 experiments, the authors compared duration judgments of filled stimuli (tones) with unfilled ones (intervals defined by clicks or gaps in tones). Temporal generalization procedures (Experiment 1) and verbal estimation procedures (Experiments 2 and 3) all showed that subjective durations of the tones were considerably longer than those of…

Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally,…