Big data mining and comparative analyses across lexica on the relationship between syllable complexity and word stress

Abstract

For about four decades, phonological theories have claimed that word stress assignment depends on the word’s syllabic structure complexity in relation to syllabic position. This study analyzes the syllabic structure implications for word stress in three languages with weight-sensitive lexical stress, namely Brazilian Portuguese, British English, and American English. After creating three corpora and applying Random Forest modeling, syllabic structure distributions for word stress were found to be bound to stress pattern and word length in number of syllables. To account for these observations, models of word naming must be extended with aspects of word stress.