Stress assignment in reading words aloud is investigated. Three-syllable Italian words with regular or irregular stress, and high or low frequencies were presented in a naming task and in a lexical decision task. With low-frequency words, naming times for regularly stressed words were faster than for words with irregular stress, whereas no difference was found for high-frequency words. Instead, in the lexical decision task the interaction between stress and frequency was significant for errors but not for reaction times. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the effect of neighborhood in pronouncing words and nonwords. In Experiment 6, words were presented in a delayed naming task to investigate the effects of stress and frequency on the implementation of the motor program for production. The results suggest that the production phase of the naming process might be to some extent involved in the assignment of stress.

Three experiments are described which made use of the priming paradigm. Prime and target were Orthographically related because they shared either the initial or the final letters. The experiments were based on the assumption that two Orthographically similar words, separated by a very short stimulus onset asynchrony, both belong to the same activated set and are therefore competing for recognition. In Experiment 1 the lexical status of the target was varied, and an inhibitory effect was found only when targets are words, not when they are pseudowords. An inhibitory effect was also found in Experiments 2 and 3, with target words of high frequency, whereas with low-frequency target words either a very small, nonsignificant inhibitory effect or a facilitatory effect was found. Moreover, the effect seemed to vary in relation to the position of the letters shared by prime and target. The results are discussed in terms of an explanation according to which the prime would inhibit the word units of the activated set when these units reach a critical threshold of activation. This threshold would be reached faster by high-frequency words of the set because they start from a higher resting level. An alternative explanation consistent with the verification model is taken into account.

No abstract

Hypothetically, words can be named by spelling-sound translation rules or by looking up a phonological code in a lexicon. Following J. Baron and C. Strawson (1976), naming performance was measured as a function of skill with each route, using sets of stimuli varying in reliance on either route. "Phoenicians" were defined to be better with rules than with look-up; "Chinese" were better at look-up than with rules. As predicted by J. Baron and C. Strawson, Phoenicians named low-frequency regular words and nonwords faster than Chinese. Contrary to predictions, Phoenicians were also faster at naming irregular words of various frequencies. Implications of these results for various dual-route models versus single-route models are discussed.

Four experiments employed a priming methodology to investigate different mechanisms of stress assignment and how they are modulated by lexical and sub-lexical mechanisms in reading aloud in Italian. Lexical stress is unpredictable in Italian, and requires lexical look-up. The most frequent stress pattern (Dominant) is on the penultimate syllable [laVOro (work)], while stress on the antepenultimate syllable [MAcchina (car)] is relatively less frequent (non-Dominant). Word and pseudoword naming responses primed by words with non-dominant stress – which require whole-word knowledge to be read correctly – were compared to those primed by nonwords. Percentage of errors to words and percentage of dominant stress responses to nonwords were measured. In Experiments 1 and 2 stress errors increased for non-dominant stress words primed by nonwords, as compared to when they were primed by words. The results could be attributed to greater activation of sub-lexical codes, and an associated tendency to assign the dominant stress pattern by default in the nonword prime condition. Alternatively, they may have been the consequence of prosodic priming, inducing more errors on trials in which the stress pattern of primes and targets was not congruent. The two interpretations were investigated in Experiments 3 and 4. The results overall suggested a limited role of the default metrical pattern in word pronunciation, and showed clear effect of prosodic priming, but only when the sub-lexical mechanism prevailed.