StAmE stress patterns

As clearly exemplified in the transcriptions in ODP, StAmE pronunciation shows a different pattern of stress from British English. StAmE pronunciation tends more to preserve secondary stress, and thus more fully-realized vowels, than British English, as in StAmE  versus British English . This results in a characteristically different rhythm for StAmE pronunciation as compared to British and other world English varieties. Educated Southern speakers tend to prefer strong initial stress (and are recognized for it) in words like insurance, police, Thanksgiving, umbrella, while other Americans place strong stress on the second syllable of these words. It is possible that a general American tendency towards strong initial stress is responsible for vowel alternations between the use of stressed and unstressed vowel forms in the weakly-stressed initial syllables of many words, such as electric  or retain .