The dogs pernew dismay. As an another example, he looked at words in English that could be used both as a noun and as a verb. But for those that did have a stress change, it was virtually always the case that the noun had the stress on the 1st syllable. Finally, people often will use a word in a new way, making something that once was a verb into a noun, or vice versa. Stress patterns are not the only form class difference.
Nouns also tend to have more syllables than do verbs.
They found that people were more likely to use them as verbs when they were shorter. In addition to the number of syllables, nouns tend to have more sounds per syllable, and to be pronounced as being longer. They read them either as a noun, or as a verb, and the authors then measured their duration. They found that words produced as nouns were longer than those produced as verbs. There are also differences in consonant and vowel quality.