Stress pattern differentiation of form class in English

Abstract

The present experiment explores the regular stress pattern that differentiates nouns and verbs in English. In some English words, a shift in stress from the first to the second syllable produces a change in form class from noun to verb (e.g., SURvey, noun; surVEY,verb). However, preliminary results suggest that this stress pattern is not solely restricted to this rather limited set of words. An analysis of the Brown Corpus [Francis and Kučera, Frequency Analysis of English Usage (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982)] revealed that the vast majority (92%) of bisyllabic words used only as nouns in English have first syllable stress (e.g., “student,” “country”) whereas the great majority (85%) of bisyllabic verbs have second syllable stress (e.g., “begin,” “receive”). In the present experiment, “ambiguous” bysyllabic words (i.e., words that do not change their stress placement with a change in form class) were examined. In these words (e.g., “answer,” “design”), acoustic measurements (duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency, and second formant frequency levels) were taken. Some stress-related acoustic differences were found between the ambiguous bisyllabic words read as nouns and those same words read as verbs. The results will be discussed in terms of their significance for lexical organization.