Children's abstraction and generalization of English lexical stress patterns

The current study investigated school-aged children's internalization of the distributional patterns of English lexical stress as a function of vocabulary size. Sixty children (5;3 to 8;3) participated in the study. The children were asked to blend two individually presented, equally stressed syllables to produce disyllabic nonwords with different resulting structures in one of two frame sentences. The frame sentences were designed to elicit either a noun or verb interpretation of the nonword. Children's receptive vocabulary was also assessed. The results indicated that children more readily blended syllable pairs that resulted in trochaic-compatible word structures than in iambic-compatible structures. This effect was strongest in young children with large vocabularies. As for stress placement, all children were sensitive to the effect of word structure, but only children with the largest vocabularies were sensitive to the biasing effect of grammatical category (noun = trochee; verb = iamb). The study results are discussed with reference to the observation that speech motor skills develop in tandem with lexical acquisition and the hypothesis that phonological knowledge emerges in part from abstraction across lexical representations.