LEXICAL STRESS

A phonological feature of many languages, where one syllable of a word carries greater prominence than the others. Lexical stress does not vary, and is assumed to be part of a word’s lexical entry. In English, lexical stress is marked acoustically by duration, loudness and/or pitch movement; and only falls on syllables with full quality vowels. In addition to the syllable bearing primary stress, others in a word may bear secondary stress– as in the third syllable of SUperMARket.

Stress appears to play an important part in the way speech is processed. There is evidence that listeners accord a higher level of attention to stressed syllables in English than to unstressed. This may be because stressed syllables are more prominent, especially in a noisy environment. They are also more reliable. They contain full quality vowels, and their phonemic segments, vowels and consonants alike, are less subject to reductions in duration. In addition, they are more informative. One way of representing imprecision in speech is to transcribe a corpus using a simplified system with only six phoneme categories. When researchers did this, they discovered that the number of words that were indistinguishable increased enormously if information relating to stress was not included.

One suggestion is that stressed syllables may provide the trigger for lexical access. POSS would form the access code for the word imPOSSible and TER for alternative. In this case, lexical access would not operate on strictly left-to-right principles, since access might be delayed until a stressed syllable was reached.

Listeners closely associate English weak syllables with functors. Indeed, it may be that unstressed syllables are not submitted to the lexicon at all, but are simply subjected to a pattern-matching process on the assumption that they constitute function words and have no lexical meaning.

 A majority of the world’s languages (perhaps around 70 per cent) have lexical stress that consistently falls on the same syllable of a word. Where it always falls on the first or last syllable, it can be regarded as demarcative, enabling the listener to determine where word boundaries fall. About 50 per cent of languages appear to fit this profile.

Although English does not, stress patterns still seem to assist listeners to locate word boundaries. Subjects have proved quite accurate in dividing up pieces of ‘reiterant speech’ (utterances whose prosody is retained but whose syllables are replaced throughout bya sequence such as /mA:/). This may be because the majority of content words in English consist of a stressed monosyllable or have a stressed first syllable.

A difficulty in assessing the contribution of stress to speech processing is that stress is relative. A syllable that bears primary stress is more prominent in relation to the syllables around it. On this argument, some commentators have concluded that vowel quality is a better discriminator of syllable types since quality lends itself to clear and rapid binary distinctions (+ or - weak vowel).

See also: Lexical segmentation, SW (strong-weak) pattern

Further reading: Laver (1994)

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