Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue...
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2)
The tests below constitute a series designed to assess your ability to discern rhythmic differences in the pronunciation of written words.
Each test has 10 items. In each item, you will be given five words, and your task is to identify the one word that differs the most from the other four in terms of the pattern of stresses (emphasized syllables) in the word when pronounced.
These tests are an assessment of the ability to decode the pronunciation of a written word, analyze a pronunciation in terms of stresses, and compare and contrast patterns of stresses with each other. These tests require a keen understanding of the pronunciation of English words.
The item type found in these tests is only infrequently found on professional intelligence tests. One example comes from a battery of tests prepared by the psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone. In Thurstone's version of this test, however, a subject taking the test must distinguish phrases or entire sentences based on their rhythm.