No abstract

The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) asserts that listeners associate greater acoustic intensity with group beginnings and greater duration with group endings. Some researchers have assumed a natural connection between these perceptual tendencies and universal principles underlying linguistic categories of rhythm. The experimental literature on ITL effects is limited in three ways. Few studies of listeners' perceptions of alternating sound sequences have used speech-like stimuli, cross-linguistic testing has been inadequate and existing studies have manipulated intensity and duration singly, whereas these features vary together in natural speech. This paper reports the results of three experiments conducted with native Zapotec speakers and one with native English speakers. We tested listeners' grouping biases using streams of alternating syllables in which intensity and duration were varied separately, and sequences in which they were covaried. The findings suggest that care should be taken in assuming a natural connection between the ITL and universal principles of prosodic organisation.

In this article we describe and develop an optimality-theoretic (OT) analysis of foot-level (secondary) and word-level (primary) stress in Nanti, a Kampa language of Peru. The distribution of stress in Nanti is sensitive to rhythmic factors, syllable quantity, vowel quality, and to whether a syllable is open or closed. The interaction of these independent variables produces a complex, multigrade stress scale married to an iterative stress system whose default preference is alternating, iambic rhythm. While each of the interacting factors in this system is familiar to phonologists, Nanti is special because the particular combination of influences and factors in Nanti contributes to a complexity of interactions that has not been documented in any other language to date.

The Iambic-Trochaic Law (Bolton, 1894;Hayes, 1995;Woodrow, 1909) asserts that listeners associate greater intensity with group beginnings (a loud-first preference) and greater duration with group endings (a long-last preference). Hayes (1987;1995) posits a natural connection between the prominences referred to in the ITL and the locations of stressed syllables in feet. However, not all lengthening in final positions originates with stressed syllables, and greater duration may also be associated with stress in nonfinal (trochaic) positions. The research described here challenged the notion that presumptive long-last effects necessarily reflect stress-related duration patterns, and investigated the general hypothesis that the robustness of long-last effects should vary depending on the strength of the association between final positions and increased duration, whatever its source. Two ITL studies were conducted in which native speakers of Spanish and of English grouped streams of rhythmically alternating syllables in which vowel intensity and/or duration levels were varied. These languages were chosen because while they are prosodically similar, increased duration on constituent-final syllables is both more common and more salient in English than Spanish. Outcomes revealed robust loud-first effects in both language groups. Long-last effects were significantly weaker in the Spanish group when vowel duration was varied singly. However, long-last effects were present and comparable in both language groups when intensity and duration were covaried. Intensity was a more robust predictor of responses than duration. A primary conclusion was that whether or not humans' rhythmic grouping preferences have an innate component, duration-based grouping preferences, at least, and the magnitude of intensity-based effects are shaped by listeners' backgrounds.(1)Iambic-Trochaic Law: Intensity has a group-beginning effect (the loud-first principle), duration, a group-ending effect (the long-last principle).Hayes (1987; 1995) posits a natural association between the prominences referred to in the ITL (greater intensity and duration) and locations of stressed syllables in feet. In particular, he interprets the long-last principle as support for his position that feet that build Crowhurst: Iambic-Trochaic Law Effects among Native Speakers of Spanish and English Art. 12, page 2 of 41 Crowhurst: Iambic-Trochaic Law Effects among Native Speakers of Spanish and English Art. 12, page 3 of 41can be related to both stress and preboundary lengthening, whose effects are additive, which enhances the duration contrast between final and nonfinal syllables (Beckman & Edwards, 1994). In Spanish, final syllables are less likely to be longer both because wordfinal stress is less common and because stress-and boundary-related lengthening patterns are less pronounced than in English (see Section 2.3). These facts suggest that increased length on final syllables might be more natural for English than Spanish speakers, and it was therefore expected that ...

This paper argues for a prosodic constraint on the formation of diminutive and augmentative forms in Mexican Spanish. Specifically, the stem preceding diminutive (dim) and augmentative (aug) suffixes in this dialect must comprise an absolute minimum of two syllables. When a stem melody cannot satisfy the two-syllable minimum, an epenthetic vowel (V) [e] surfaces at the right edge of the stem (e.g.panesito‘little bread’ ←pan). In the analysis proposed here, a disyllabic templatef[σ σ] is mapped to stems from left to right as part of dim/aug-formation. Whether or not a consonant (C)/s/ surfaces before the suffix will be analysed as a consequence of syllabification in some cases (e.g.koronita/koronota← korona‘crown’ vs.