In recent analyses of the speech of remaining speakers, word stress was felt to be nondistinctive.

Nondistinctive secondary and lesser stresses occur phonetically and are conditioned by phonetic and syntactic environments.

For instance, glottal stops are not phonemic in Kokota but are often written with an apostrophe (as in Cheke Holo) when they occur in certain nondistinctive environments, such as to mark morpheme boundaries between neighboring vowels.