Perception of stress contrasts in semantic and nonsemantic contexts by children

Using 140 subjects (20 children each from kindergarten through the sixth grade), this study followed the developmental trends of children on two tasks involving the perception of stress contrasts. Task I consisted of discriminating whether two syllables in bisyllabic nonsense words have the same or different stress patterns. Task II consisted of sentence pairs, for half of which the first sentence in each pair provided appropriate lexical as well as stress patterns for the second sentence. The first sentence in the remaining sentence pairs provided the appropriate lexical context but an inappropriate stress context for the second sentence. Subjects were to evaluate whether members of each sentence pair sound "good together' or "not good together.' Results yielded remarkable lawfulness in the developmental trends for both tasks, and were discussed in terms of children's perception of stress contrasts in semantic vs. nonsemantic conditions.