Abstract
Speakers/listeners have (unconscious) knowledge about sound regularities of their native language, which includes metrical structure: where do stressed syllables occur in words? In many languages, stress falls near the edges of words: on the initial, final, or prefinal syllable. It has been hypothesized that this "delimitative" property of word stress assists listeners when they parse speech into words. In an initial stress language, for example, every stressed syllable can be safely taken to mark the beginning of a new word. Experimental evidence for the "Metrical Segmentation Hypothesis" comes mainly from initial stress languages; metrical segmentation in non-initial stress languages has hardly been investigated. Hence, it is largely unknown how language-specific metrical knowledge is that listeners use when parsing speech: do listeners of non-initial stress languages use different cues that specifically fit the metrical structure of their native language? This project has the goal of answering this question by adopting a cross-linguistic perspective: it investigates a much wider sample of languages than has been studied thus far. Moreover, it adds an acquisition perspective on parsing, investigating origins of language-specific metrical structure in first and second language acquisition. Combining a cross-linguistic approach with acquisition increases chances of learning how fundamental properties of human language are rooted in language processing.