Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A majority of English words have initial stress, either by type or by token (Cutler & Carter, 1987). However, the stresspattern of a particular English word depends on its phonological structure; if the second syllable contain a diphthong ortense vowel, the word is regularly iambic (Halle & Vergnaud, 1987; Guion, Clark, Harada, & Wayland, 2003). Here, weprovide experimental evidence demonstrating that this phonological pattern is used by adult English listeners processing asequence of nonce syllable sequences. In Experiment 1, we find that English speakers have an iambic preference parsinga syllable sequence with all heavy syllables. In Experiment 2, we find that processing stress produces an entrainmenteffect where the rhythm created by the stress pattern will carry on into linguistic material without such cues. Together,these results suggest that English speakers make use of further abstract knowledge of English phonology in finding wordboundaries.