ABSTRACT
The child trying to figure out the structure of his or her native language will be faced with a segmentation problem on at least two levels. The child must identify word-level units in the stream of speech and must also identify the phrase-level units of the native language. Several other chapters in this volume describe potential roles for prosodic cues, including stress, in the identification of phrase-level units in language. In this chapter, I focus on the potential roles of stress in the initial identification of word-level units.
