Metrical Phonology has asserted that stress shift does not occur in English compounds because it violates the Continuous Column Constraint. Noun phrases, on the other hand, freely allow for stress shift, whereby the preceding stress moves forward to the preceding heavy syllable. This paper hypothesizes that stress does not shift in compounds as opposed to noun phrases and compares their pitch accentual patterns in a phonetic experiment. More specifically, we examined two-word combinations, noun phrases and compounds, whose boundaries involve stress clash and assured that the preceding words involve a heavy syllable ahead of the stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress. Depending on where the preceding pitch accent is aligned, stress shift is determined. Results show that stress shift occurs in approximately 47% of the noun phrases and 59% of the compounds; therefore, the hypothesis is not borne out. This suggests that the surface representations derived by phonological rules may not be implemented in real utterance but that phonetic forms may be determined by the phonetic constraints. directly operating on human speech.