Abstract
This paper aims to shed light on regularities underlying German stress assignment. The results of a pseudoword production task suggest that rhyme complexity of the final syllable is a strong predictor of main stress position in German. We also found that antepenult rhyme complexity and orthographic rhyme structure have significant effect on stress assignment. In general, the effects seem to be probabilistic rather than categorical. Our results suggest that phonological theories of German word stress need to allow for multiple probabilistic factors, including syllabic structure of all stressable syllables and orthographic coding.