SW (STRONG-WEAK) PATTERN
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P292
2025-10-18
298
SW (STRONG-WEAK) PATTERN
A rhythmic pattern in which a ‘strong’ syllable is followed by, or grouped with, a ‘weak’ one. In many accounts, ‘strong’ is taken to mean ‘stressed relative to the following weak syllable’; but in some it is defined as bearing a full quality vowel rather than a weak one.
In metrical phonology and elsewhere, the pattern is recognised as a phonological unit (the SW foot) which is highly characteristic of English speech. A preference for the pattern appears to underlie phenomena such as cliticisation, where a weak syllable attaches itself leftwards to a strong one (fish’n # chips, must’ve # done).
Research suggests that English listeners divide up the speech stream into strong-weak units in order to determine where word boundaries are most likely to fall. This Metrical Segmentation Strategy is an effective one, since around 90 per cent of content words in running speech begin with a strong syllable.
From an early age, English-acquiring infants seem to be aware of the SW pattern (sometimes referred to in the literature as a trochee). American infants as young as nine months manifest a preference for SW words rather than those that follow other rhythmic patterns. The pattern may later assist them in the process of bootstrapping to locate words in connected speech.
The language that infants produce retains certain weak syllables from adult speech and omits others:
giRAFFE! raffe MONkey! Monkey baNAna! nana
The parts which are retained seem to reflect a view of the typical word as SW in form. Gerken (1994) hypothesises that infants develop a metrical template which shapes the words that they produce.
See also: Bootstrapping, Lexical segmentation
Further reading: Jusczyk (1997)
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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