Dimensions of Phonological Stress

Top researchers explore the nature of stress and accent patterns in languages, especially the nature of their representations and how people learn them.

Stress and accent patterns are organizing features of natural language. This book presents in-depth analysis and research by top scholars investigating the nature of stress and accent patterns in natural language, and it examines the question of how children acquire the stress and accent patterns of their native language.Stress and accent are central, organizing features of grammar, but their precise nature continues to be a source of mystery and wonder. These issues come to the forefront in acquisition, where the tension between the abstract mental representations and the concrete physical manifestations of stress and accent is deeply reflected. Understanding the nature of the representations of stress and accent patterns, and understanding how stress and accent patterns are learned, informs all aspects of linguistic theory and language acquisition. These two themes - representation and acquisition - form the organizational backbone of this book. Each is addressed along different dimensions of stress and accent, including the position of an accent or stress within various prosodic domains and the acoustic dimensions along which the pronunciation of stress and accent may vary. The research presented in the book is multidisciplinary, encompassing theoretical linguistics, speech science, and computational and experimental research.