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Please be advised that this information was generated on 2016-09-13 and may be subject to change. Word length and the location of primary word stress in Dutch, German, and English* MIRJAM ERNESTUS AND ANNEKE NEIJT This study addresses the extent to which the location of primary stress in Dutch, German, and English monomorphemic words is a¤ected by the syl-lables preceding the three final syllables. We present analyses of the mono-morphemic words in the CELEX lexical database, which showed that penul-timate primary stress is less frequent in Dutch and English trisyllabic than quadrisyllabic words. In addition, we discuss paper-and-pencil experiments in which native speakers assigned primary stress to pseudowords. These ex-periments provided evidence that in all three languages penultimate stress is more likely in quadrisyllabic than in trisyllabic words. We explain this length e¤ect with the preferences in these languages for word-initial stress and for alternating patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. The exper-imental data also showed important intra- and interspeaker variation, and they thus form a challenging test case for theories of language variation.1 1