at 7.5 months english-learning infants have been shown to be able to segment words from speech that show a strong-weak (i.e., trochaic) stress pattern, which is the most common stress pattern in the english language, but they were not able to segment out words that follow a weak-strong pattern. in the sequence ‘guitar is’ these infants thus heard ‘taris’ as the word-unit because it follows a strong-weak pattern.