The current article presents the results of a psycholinguistic study on word stress productivity in Cairene Arabic. Cairene Arabic is a language with a highly predictable placement of word stress based on a very regular foot structure. Participants’ productive stress abilities are evaluated in a reading experiment using Cairene Arabic pseudowords. The main goal is to test what rules, if any, affect the stress assignment in Cairene Arabic, and to what extent metrical structures play a role. The results of this experiment reveal that for Cairene Arabic the internal structure of prosodic words in terms of feet determines the stress assignment for novel words. Frequency patterns of stress are involved as well, but the frequency patterns cannot override the role of stress assignment caused by the regular metrical structure.

Introductory seminars to German linguistics lay the foundation for further linguistic course work and the students’ interest and advancement in specific topics. Therefore, it is essential for students to understand and remember elementary terminology and methodology and to be able to apply and transfer their knowledge. To support teaching through autonomous learning and to deepen the students’ knowledge and motivation in phonetics and phonology, we developed the board game Ph[o:]nix based on the well-known ScrabbleTM board game. We modified the game by exchanging letters for phonemes and by adding event cards covering further knowledge relevant to the subject area of phonology and phonetics. We invited students of introductory seminars to play the game and to participate in an assessment to evaluate the game qualitatively and quantitively. We found that students who played the game twice showed a significant improvement relative to a non-playing control group. Additionally, the game was rated very positive by the majority of the players, for instance with respect to the fun factor or additional benefits for exam preparation.

Matthias Richter: Werner Frey, André Meinunger & Kerstin Schwabe (Hgg.) (2016): Inner-sentential Propositional Proforms. Syntactic properties and interpretative effects.