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Description: How do skilled readers of English decide which syllable of a word to stress? In four behavioral studies, we examined this issue using disyllabic nonwords that varied in number of initial and final consonants. The tasks included oral reading of sentences that contained the nonwords, pronunciation of isolated nonwords, and metalinguistic judgments about stress. Contrary to the influential view within linguistics that onsets are irrelevant to stress assignment, the rate of first-syllable stress increased with the number of consonants in the onset of the first syllable. Also influential were the number of consonants at the end of the nonword, the presence of letter strings that are potential prefixes, and the syntactic context of the nonword in a sentence. In our final study, which involved 3,061 English words with the same general structure as the nonwords in the experiments, we found that stress could be predicted with a high degree of accuracy based on the same factors that influenced performance in the behavioral studies. The results are consistent with a statistical-learning view of reading according to which skilled readers have internalized cues to stress that exist in the language but less consistent with Rastle and Coltheart’s (2000) rule-based model of stress assignment in nonword reading.