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Learning to stress: a case study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Harriet B. Klein
Harriet B. Klein
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

A repertoire of polysyllabic words, produced by an approximately 2-year-old child, was analysed for primary stress application. A general rule for stress application did not emerge from the data. Instead, much variability existed among tokens of individual lexical items (which were imitative and/or spontaneous) and among different lexical items with the same stress contour, regarding the placement of primary stress. Intraword and interword variation suggested the existence of four groups of words treated differently with respect to primary stress placement. The word groups were separated by their characteristic stress contours, which were (1) conventional primary stress, (2) misplaced stress, (3) level stress, and (4) undetermined stress. In general, consistent application of conventional stress was related, significantly, with lexical items represented by primarily spontaneous tokens. Results support a view of lexical primacy during early stages of learning word stress.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 375 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank Lois Bloom, Lois Hood and Patsy Lightbown for making available Peter's tape recorded samples. Thanks are also extended to Lois Bloom, A. Damien Martin and Naomi Schiff-Myers for critical reading of an earlier draft of this manuscript, and to Jay Gottleib for advice about statistical analysis. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Convention of the New York State Speech-Language-Hearing Association (1979) and the Applied Linguistics Winter Conference, New York City (1982). Address for correspondence: Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, New York University, 829 Shimkin Hall, Washington Square, New York 10003.

References

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