What affects recognition most – wrong wordstress or wrong word accent?

In an attempt to find out which of the two Swedish prosodic contrasts of 1) wordstress pattern and 2) tonal word accent category has the greatest communicative weight, a lexical decision experiment was conducted: in one part word stress pattern was changed from trochaic to iambic, and in the other part trochaic accentII words were changed to accent I.Native Swedish listeners were asked to decide whether the distorted words werereal words or ‘non-words’. A clear tendency is that listeners preferred to give more‘non-word’ responses when the stress pattern was shifted, compared to when wordaccent category was shifted. This could have implications for priority of phonological features when teaching Swedish as a second language.

Quantified Interference: Information Theory and Information Flow

The paper investigates which of Shannon’s measures (entropy, conditional entropy, mutual information) is the right one for the task of quantifying information flow in a programming language. We examine earlier relevant contributions from Denning, McLean and Gray and we propose and motivate a specific quantitative definition of information flow. We prove results relating equivalence relations, interference of program variables, independence of random variables and the flow of confidential information. Finally, we show how, in our setting, Shannon’s Perfect Secrecy theorem provides a sufficient condition to determine whether a program leaks confidential information.