Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Experimental Child

Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp

Brief Report

Young infants encode lexical stress in newly

encountered words
Suzanne Curtin *
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this study, we examined the nature of infants’ representations of

Received 30 April 2009 newly encountered word forms. Using a word–object association
Revised 3 December 2009 task, we taught 14-month-olds novel three-syllable words differ-
Available online 20 January 2010
ing in segments and stress patterns. At test, we manipulated the
stress pattern of the word or the position of the stressed syllable
Keywords:
in the word. Our findings reveal that young infants store the stress
Language development
Infant representations
information about the word, including the position in which the
Associative word learning stressed syllable occurs, suggesting that infants form prosodically
Lexical stress rich lexical representations of newly encountered words.
Speech perception Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Stress detection

Over the course of the first year of life, infants become increasingly proficient word learners. At the
early stages, 10-month-olds are pure associationists. That is, they will map a novel word to an object
only if they find the object to be interesting regardless of speaker intent (Pruden, Hirsh-Pasek, Golink-
off, & Hennon, 2006). The ability to link novel words and objects without contextual support has been
demonstrated primarily with infants of 13 months or older (Schafer & Plunkett, 1998). By 14 months
of age, infants can distinguish between novel words presented as nouns and those presented as adjec-
tives (Waxman & Booth, 2001), and in purely associative learning tasks, they can learn two novel
word–object pairings such as lif and neem (Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998). These find-
ings suggest that 14-month-olds are well on their way to becoming efficient word learners. Here we
explore the nature of the representation of a new word form and ask whether 14-month-olds’ repre-
sentations of newly experienced words include the word stress information.
In languages that use lexical stress, it may be contrastive, it may be assigned by rule, or it may be a
combination of both. The contrastive use of stress occurs in several languages, such as Modern Persian
(e.g., MAhi ‘a month,’ maHI ‘fish’ [Ferguson, 1957]) and Spanish (e.g., Animo ‘courage,’ aNImo ‘I encour-

* Fax: +1 403 282 8249.

E-mail address: scurtin@ucalgary.ca

0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.12.004
 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385 377

age,’ aniMO ‘he [she] encouraged’ [Hualde, 2005]). In English, words do not tend to be distinguished
based solely on their stress pattern. However, there are cases where this does occur. When stress is
used contrastively it most likely demarcates a change in grammatical class (e.g., noun to verb as in
PERmit and perMIT). If stress distinguishes between words, it is possible that listeners use it to recog-
nize words.
Sensitivity to rhythm and stress is evident early in infancy. Newborns discriminate languages based
on their rhythmic properties (e.g., Mehler & Christophe, 1994; Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998), and
infants of 1–4 months detect changes in the rhythmic patterns of alternating strong–weak (Sw) sylla-
bles (Jusczyk & Thompson, 1978). Infants of 5 months separate trochaic (Sw) items consistently from
iambic (weak–strong [wS]) items, as indicated by a mismatch response, whereas there is no reliable
response with younger infants (Weber, Hahne, Friedrich, & Friederici, 2004). Newborns demonstrate
sensitivities to the acoustic and phonological differences between closed-class items and lexical items
(Shi, Werker, & Morgan, 1998) and by 6 months of age show a clear preference for lexical items over
closed-class ones (Shi & Werker, 2001). In languages such as English and German, closed-class items
tend to be unstressed in running speech. German infants of 7.5 months detect unstressed monosyllabic
closed-class items in continuous speech after preexposure to the words in isolation (Höhle & Weissen-
born, 2003), and English-learning 7-month-olds detect when stress is shifted to another syllable in a
recently segmented word (Curtin, Mintz, & Christiansen, 2005). Thus, infants under 12 months of age
demonstrate sensitivity to stress in a number of environments and across different tasks.
Word recognition is influenced by stress during the second half of the first year of life. For example,
11-month-olds do not recognize a familiar word if phonetic detail in a stressed syllable is changed
(Vihman, Nakai, Depaolis, & Halle, 2004), but if an onset consonant in an unstressed syllable of a famil-
iar word is changed (e.g., canárd to ganárd), infants of this age treat both words as familiar (Halle & de
Boysson-Bardies, 1996). Changing the stress pattern of a familiar word does not affect word recogni-
tion with 11-month-olds, but it does slow down processing (Vihman et al., 2004). Even toddlers dem-
onstrate sensitivity to the stress information of familiar words. That is, mismatching the stress pattern
of Sw words affects recognition of familiar words by 3-year-olds, but mismatching the stress pattern
of wS words does not (De Bree, Van Alphen, Fikkert, & Wijnen, 2008). These findings suggest that
although familiar words may allow some variability between forms, infants are still encoding the
stressed syllable and this influences word recognition.
Less variability is tolerated with novel word forms. Indeed, 10.5-month-olds detect segmental
changes in the unstressed syllables of novel words. That is, when infants were familiarized with iam-
bic nonwords (e.g., tuPONG) and then presented with forms that differed in the phonetic content of the
weak syllable (e.g., buPONG) and completely unfamiliar novel forms, they looked equally long to both
the unfamiliar words and the phonetically similar forms (Johnson, 2005). Changing the stress pattern
of a newly encountered word also affects 12-month-olds’ recognition (Curtin, accepted for publica-
tion), and 12-month-olds can learn two new word–object pairings even when the novel words differ
only in their stress patterns (e.g., Xyz and xYz) (Curtin, 2009). Perhaps less stable representations of
newly experienced words require closer matches between tokens for recognition to occur. Taken to-
gether, studies with familiar and novel words seem to indicate that although stress information is
sometimes ignored, it is encoded in representations.
The premise that stress is stored in word representations may conflict with theories of adult spoken
word recognition that posit relatively abstract representations of lexical items. Stressed and un-
stressed syllables are not differentiated in stored words in English, according to this view, because
stress information is not part of the representation (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Studdert-Ken-
nedy, 1976). Rather, a set of rules assigns stress to English words (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), and these
rules are stored separately from the phonological representation of the word (Halle, 1998). Thus, if
spoken word recognition is achieved with respect to abstract representations in which all predictable
and nondistinct information is absent (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991), lexical stress should not influ-
ence word recognition. Whether stress influences lexical access in adults seems to depend on the task.
For example, in cross-modal priming experiments with English-speaking adults, words such as FOR-
bear and forBEAR prime each other equally, essentially acting as a homophone (Cutler, 1986). However,
English adults can differentiate between primary and secondary stresses using duration and intensity
(Mattys, 2000), and stress influences lexical access in ‘‘noisy” conditions, such as running speech,
378 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385

when adults are segmenting new words (Creel, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2006). Thus, it appears that adults’
lexical access is influenced, at least in some tasks, by stress. But, importantly, evidence from these
studies suggests that adult representations must encode stress information.
The findings outlined above demonstrate that infants of 12 months or younger are sensitive to
stress information. However, findings from previous studies using English novel words in word–object
associative learning tasks (Curtin, 2009) might be explained if the infants stored only the stressed syl-
lable. We also do not know whether this sensitivity to stress would be demonstrated with more pro-
ficient word learners. Thus, we explored whether 14-month-olds require word-level stress to be an
exact match in order to recognize a new word form using the Switch task (Werker et al., 1998). This
task allows us to strip away contextual support and examine what information infants store and ac-
cess when linking a novel word to a novel object. We examined 14-month-olds’ ability to detect
changes in the stress pattern (Experiment 1) and changes in the position of the stressed syllables
(Experiment 2) in newly experienced word forms. We hypothesize that representations encode all
of the information about the word (Werker & Curtin, 2005) and that changes to the newly learned
word at test will affect word recognition.

Experiment 1

Infants of 14 months were taught two novel word–object pairings. At test, infants were presented
with three types of test trials: a match in the pairing, a mismatch in the pairing, and a mismatch in the
stress pattern of the word. If infants store the stress information about the word in their representa-
tion, they should detect the mismatches. If stress is not encoded, recognition of the word–object pair-
ing should not be affected.

Method

Participants
A total of 16 14-month-olds (M = 14 months 15 days, SD = 7 days) from monolingual English homes
successfully participated in this study. An additional 10 infants were tested but not included in the
analysis due to failure to habituate (n = 1), experimenter/equipment error (n = 4), fussiness (n = 2),
or parent interference (n = 3). Infants were randomly assigned to one of two groups for counterbalanc-
ing purposes. Each participating infant was given an ‘‘Infant Speech Scientist” T-shirt and an age-
appropriate book.

Materials
Three-syllable words with differing trochaic stress patterns were recorded by a female native
speaker of English. The stimuli consisted of Bedoka, TIpegu, beDOka, and tiPEgu (uppercase letters indi-
cate stress). All syllables contained full vowels (i.e., no reduced vowels occurred in unstressed sylla-
bles). Stress was assessed by pitch, duration, and intensity differences. The average acoustic
measurements for the stressed and unstressed syllables are presented in Table 1.
The stressed syllables differed significantly from their unstressed counterparts in their pitch, F(1,
62) = 29.46, p < .001, and duration, F(1, 62) = 89.09, p < .001, but not in their amplitude, F(1, 62) = 1.78,
p = .187.
Infants in one group were habituated to BEdoka and tiPEgu, and infants in the other group were
habituated to beDOka and Tipegu. This ensured that the words were maximally different in both seg-
ments and stress pattern.
Each habituation and test trial consisted of 10 tokens with a 1.5-s silent interval between exem-
plars, resulting in audio files of 20 s in duration, one for each word. Each novel word was associated
with a novel object (see Fig. 1).

Apparatus
Testing took place in a 2.74  1.82-m quiet dimly lit room. Infants sat on their parents’ laps facing a
screen (122 cm wide  91.5 cm high) approximately 1.5 m away. Images were projected onto the
 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385 379

Table 1
Average acoustic measurements of auditory stimuli in Experiments 1 and 2

Syllable type Pitch Duration Intensity

(Hz) (s) (dB)
Stressed
BE 372 (15) .38 (.05) 73 (3.0)
DO 354 (13) .42 (.04) 71 (1.1)
TI 374 (13) .29 (.01) 71 (1.5)
PE 352 (9) .49 (.06) 68 (2.0)
Unstressed
be 297 (50) .29 (.03) 70 (1.4)
do 336 (37) .29 (.03) 71 (1.7)
ti 311 (27) .29 (.01) 67 (1.0)
pe 328 (54) .31 (.07) 70 (2.5)
Final
ka 228 (7) .44 (.05) 63 (2.8)
gu 230 (10) .40 (.05) 67 (3.0)

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

Fig. 1. Objects used in Experiments 1 and 2.

screen via a NEC LT245 projector. Auditory stimuli were delivered at 65 ± 5 dB over a Bose 101 speaker
located directly below the screen. Infants were recorded using a Sony DCRDVD92 digital video camera.
Parents wore Bose True Noise-Canceling Headphones, over which music was played. Habit X 1.0 (Co-
hen, Atkinson, & Chaput, 2004), run on a Macintosh Power PC G5, was used to order stimuli presen-
tation and collect looking time data. Both the visual and auditory stimuli played from digitized files on
the computer. The experimenter, who was blind to the auditory stimuli and type of trial, monitored
the infants’ looking behavior via a closed-circuit television system from an adjacent testing room. A
designated key was pressed on the computer keyboard during infant looks. The video record was used
for subsequent reliability coding.

Design
We used a modified version of the Switch procedure (Werker et al., 1998). Infants were habituated
to two word–object pairings and tested on their ability to detect a switch in the pairing. Each trial be-
gan when infants fixated on a flashing red light. Infants were presented with a pretest stimulus, the
label munepo (all syllables were equally stressed) paired with a waterwheel. During the habituation
phase, infants were shown two word–object pairs (e.g., Pair A: BEdoka–Object X; Pair B: tiPEgu–Object
Y). Every block of four trials contained two instances of each word–object pairing presented in a ran-
dom order (e.g., ABAB, ABBA). Looking time was calculated online, and when the average looking time
across a four-trial block decreased to the preset criterion (65%), the habituation phase ended. Infants
participated in a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 24 habituation trials. All trials were of a fixed
length (i.e., they were not infant-controlled).
Following habituation, infants were presented with three test trials in randomized order. As with
the habituation trials, test trials were fixed in length. In the Same trial, the familiar word and object
were presented in a familiar combination (e.g., BEdoka–Object X). There were two Switch (or mis-
380 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385

match) trials. One Switch trial, Object Switch, involved the presentation of a word with the incorrect
object (e.g., BEdoka–Object Y). This trial ensured that infants learned the appropriate mappings be-
tween the objects and words. The other Switch trial, Stress Switch, involved a shift in the position
of stress in the word (e.g., Bedoka–Object A ? beDOka–Object A). In this Switch trial, the segments
did not change and the object was appropriate for those segments. In the final posttest trial, infants
were again presented with munepo and the waterwheel. It was expected that if infants were still en-
gaged in the experiment, looking time would recover to near pretest level during this final trial.

Results and discussion

The pretest and posttest were compared to determine whether infants maintained interest
throughout the experiment and recovered from habituation. There was no significant difference be-
tween the pretest (M = 15.34, SD = 3.85) and the posttest (M = 15.53, SD = 4.38). The posttest was then
compared with the last habituation block (M = 6.54, SD = 3.37). The posttest was significantly different
from the last habituation block, t(15) = 8.31, p < .001. The infants maintained interest and recovered
from habituation. The average number of habituation trials was 14.75 (SD = 6.14).
There was no effect of trial order or group (ps > .05). The mean looking time to the Object Switch
(M = 6.76, SD = 3.28), Stress Switch (M = 7.66, SD = 5.07), and Same (M = 4.67, SD = 2.86) trials was cal-
culated, and significance for trial type was observed, F(2, 14) = 4.59, p = .03, g2 = .40. To clarify the re-
sults of the analysis of variance (ANOVA), paired-sample t tests (two-tailed) comparing the different
trials were conducted. A significant difference was revealed between the Same and Object Switch tri-
als, t(15) = 2.23, p = .04, and between the Same and Stress Switch trials, t(15) = 2.56, p = .02, but not
between the two Switch trials (Object Switch and Stress Switch), t(15) = 0.655, p = .52. Thus, infants
looked longer during both the Object Switch and Stress Switch trials than during the Same trial (Fig. 2).
These results indicate that 14-month-olds are clearly able to learn two novel words and pair them
with two novel objects. This supports the hypothesis that infants are storing the stress information
about the word and detect when stress is shifted to an adjacent syllable. It is possible, however, that
infants store only the stressed syllable (e.g., BE from BEdoka) and, when stress is shifted to the adjacent
syllable, detect a mismatch between the stored syllable and a differently stressed syllable (e.g., beD-
Oka). To confirm that infants store more than just the stressed syllable, we tested 14-month-olds using
the same procedure as in Experiment 1 to see whether they would detect a mismatch when the
stressed syllable is in a different location in the word.

Fig. 2. The 14-month-olds’ looking times for Same, Object Switch, and Stress Switch trials. *The Same trial is significantly
different from the two Switch trials.
 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385 381

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 examined whether infants encode more than just the stressed syllable of a newly
encountered word.

Method

Participants
A total of 16 14-month-olds (M = 14 months 15 days, SD = 7 days) from monolingual English homes
successfully participated in this study. An additional 12 infants were tested but not included in the
analysis due to failure to habituate (n = 5), experimenter/equipment error (n = 3), or parent interfer-
ence (n = 4). Infants were randomly assigned to one of two groups for counterbalancing purposes. Each
participating infant was given an ‘‘Infant Speech Scientist” T-shirt and an age-appropriate book.

Materials, apparatus, and procedure

The materials were the same as in Experiment 1. However, rather than having a mismatch in stress
assignment (e.g., BEdoka vs. beDOka), the mismatch arose based on the position of the stressed syllable
(e.g., BEdoka vs. doBEka) (see Table 1 for acoustic measurements). As with Experiment 1, there was also
an object mismatch. The same apparatus and procedure were used.

Results and discussion

Once again, the pretest and posttest were compared to determine whether infants maintained
interest throughout the experiment and recovered from habituation. There was no significant differ-
ence between the pretest (M = 17.78, SD = 2.48) and the posttest (M = 19.28, SD = 1.34). The posttest
was then compared with the last habituation block (M = 8.36, SD = 1.66). The posttest was significantly
different from the last habituation block, t(15) = 17.88, p < .001. The infants maintained interest and
recovered from habituation. The average number of trials taken for the infants to habituate was
14.75 (SD = 6.14).
There was no effect of trial order or group (ps > .05). The mean looking time to the Object Switch
(M = 11.0, SD = 4.15), Syllable Switch (M = 10.62, SD = 3.96), and Same (M = 7.70, SD = 3.22) trials was

Fig. 3. The 14-month-olds’ looking times for Same, Object Switch, and Syllable Switch trials. *The Same trial is significantly
different from the two Switch trials.
382 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385

calculated, and significance for trial type was found, F(2, 14) = 3.87, p = .03, g2 = .20. To clarify the find-
ings of the ANOVA, a series of paired-sample t tests (two-tailed) revealed significant difference in look-
ing behavior for the Same versus Object Switch trials, t(15) = 2.26, p = .04, and for the Same versus
Syllable Switch trials, t(15) = 2.63, p = .02, but no difference was observed between the two Switch
trials (Object Switch and Syllable Switch), t(15) = 0.341, p = .738. Thus, infants looked longer during
both the Object Switch and Syllable Switch trials than during the Same trial (Fig. 3).
Infants of 14 months store more than just the stressed syllable in their representations of newly
encountered words. If they stored only the stressed syllable, hearing the stressed syllable—regardless
of the position—should not have affected the infants’ response.

General discussion

Young infants are sensitive to stress patterns early in development. This sensitivity continues and,
as the results from this study suggest, 14-month-olds pay attention to and encode stress in their rep-
resentations of newly formed word–object pairings. Moreover, they are storing not only the stressed
syllable but also the sequence in which the syllables occurred.
The findings of the current study support exemplar-based representations for newly encountered
words. Numerous studies have provided evidence for the hypothesis that infants have detailed repre-
sentations of words (see Newman, 2008, for a review). Indeed, infants store specific indexical proper-
ties such as speaker (Houston & Jusczyk, 2000), stress, amplitude, and affect (Singh, Bortfeld, &
Morgan, 2002). That is, infants encode all of the information, including stress and syllable order, in
their representations. This may appear to be at odds with segmentation studies. That is, between 6
and 11 months of age, infants will recognize recently segmented forms even if the stress pattern is
not identical to that of the familiarization stream. Specifically, if familiarized to an artificial language
where one of the cues to segmentation is stress (e.g., . . . abXyz . . .) and then tested on forms with
equally emphasized syllables (e.g., xyz, XYZ), infants recognize these forms as instances of sequences
from the familiarization stream (Curtin et al., 2005; Johnson & Seidl, 2009; Thiessen & Saffran, 2003).
However, if the actual stress pattern is altered such that a different syllable is stressed at test (e.g.,
xYz), 7-month-olds do not recognize these forms as familiar (Curtin et al., 2005). This suggests that
when infants hear sequences without any stress contour at test, these items are close enough to be
recognized as familiar. However, if the actual pattern of stress is altered, this interrupts recognition,
suggesting that infants treat differently stressed sequences as unique forms.
Although it is possible that the infants in the current study are storing only the rhythm pattern
(e.g., Sww) and not the segmental information, evidence from 12-month-olds suggests that this is
not the case. Curtin and Werker (2004) habituated 12-month-olds to forms such as BEdoka–Object
A and tiPEgu–Object B. At test, infants were presented with a Same trial (BEdoka–Object A) and a
Switch trial with a change in segments but the appropriate rhythm (TIpegu–Object A). Infants detected
the switch in the pairing. If they were attending solely to rhythmic information (Sww), they would not
have detected the mismatch (Curtin & Werker, 2004).
Our findings demonstrate that stress is part of the representations of newly encountered words,
suggesting detailed representations. However, not all associative learning studies have found that evi-
dence for phonetic detail. Infants under 17 months generally have difficulty in detecting a mismatch in
the pairing of newly learned minimal words that differ in their consonants such as bin and din (Pater,
Stager, & Werker, 2004; Stager & Werker, 1997; Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, 2002). Findings
from interactive object categorization tasks with novel words have demonstrated that even 20-
month-olds will confuse labels that minimally differ in their vowel while succeeding at distinguishing
labels that minimally differ in consonants (Nazzi, 2005; Nazzi & New, 2007). Although the results of
these studies suggest that infants may have impoverished representations, infants do detect minimal
differences if the learning condition is enriched (Ballem & Plunkett, 2005; Fennell, 2006), if infants are
presented with familiar or known words (Bailey & Plunkett, 2002; Fennell, 2004; Fennell & Werker,
2003; Swingley & Aslin, 2002), or if sound differences are large enough (i.e., a change in three features:
height, backness, and rounding, e.g., mot mispronounced as mit) (Mani & Plunkett, 2008). Thus, it is un-
clear whether the differences observed in these studies are the result of impoverished representations
 S. Curtin / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 105 (2010) 376–385 383

or perhaps the result of cognitive demands (Fennell & Werker, 2003; Fennell & Werker, 2004). Recent
work by Yoshida, Fennell, Swingley, and Werker (2009) supports the latter. In their study, they merged
the Switch task habituation with visual choice at test. When 14-month-olds were habituated to min-
imally different words and then presented with a choice of the correct object and the incorrect object at
test, they succeeded in detecting an incorrect pairing between a word and an object. This suggests that
infants encode the information but that task demands—needing to retrieve the pairing in the Switch
design—can influence their ability to access the appropriate information.
One framework that has been proposed for understanding the patterns of results in early word
learning and lexical processing is PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Inter-
active Representations) (Werker & Curtin, 2005). Within PRIMIR, representations are richly detailed.
Representations become reweighted and reorganized as a function of listening experience and percep-
tual learning using general principles of statistical learning (see also WRAPSA [word recognition and
phonetic structure acquisition] [Jusczyk, 1992, 1997]). Access to the information in the representations
depends on the joint activity of three dynamic filters: initial biases, the developmental level of the
child, and requirements of the specific language task the child is facing. This framework is helpful
for understanding the range of results obtained with respect to infants’ sensitivity to and use of stress
information. In particular, the developmental level and task demands result in differential access to
information. When infants are segmenting word forms from the continuous speech stream, they rely
on or weight cues differently depending on their developmental level and their knowledge of linguis-
tic patterns (e.g., stress, statistics). Differences in word recognition may result because of different task
demands. If infants are faced with recognizing a familiar word, relying on stress might not be as
important as it is when recognizing a newly encountered word where the representation might not
be as stable as a familiar or known word.
Over time, as infants become more experienced, their representations may change or they may
ignore information that is not critical in separating words from each other. In languages other than
English that use stress contrastively, one would imagine that this information would always be en-
coded. The results of this study suggest that even English-learning infants continue to attend to stress
information. However, it is necessary to replicate these experiments with older infants. Because stress
in English differentiates between only a handful of nouns and verbs, older infants might ignore stress
in novel object (noun) word learning contexts.
Our findings demonstrate that when 14-month-olds learn two new word–object pairings, they en-
code information about lexical stress. Thus, by implication, children encode more information than is
necessary to distinguish new words from other words in their lexicon. This finding suggests that it is
not a growing lexicon and the need to make increasingly fine distinctions that drives an increasing
specificity in the encoding of phonological properties of new words. Instead, details for word forms
are always stored in the lexicon. Taken together, these experiments provide insight into the nature
of the representations for newly encountered words and provide further support for rich
representations.

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