Prosodic features of familial language impairment: constraints on stress assignment

This paper is part of a study of prosodic features of familial language impairment (FLI) in English. It reports the results of a set of experiments designed to investigate the factors that play a role in the assignment of stress to words which are longer than two syllables. It appears that stress assignment in FLI is constrained by a restriction limiting the maximal size of the stress domain to a bisyllabic unit, formally defined as the minimal prosodic word. We hypothesize that this restriction is responsible for variable patterns of word truncation, stress levelling and compounding that characterize the production of polysyllabic words.