Cues to stress assignment in reading aloud.

Abstract

Research seeking to uncover the mechanisms by which we read aloud has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic items presented in isolation. Consequently, important challenges that arise when considering polysyllabic word reading, such as stress assignment, have been ignored, while little is known about how important sentence-level stress cues, such as syntax and rhythm, may influence word reading aloud processes. The present study seeks to fill these gaps in the literature by (a) documenting the individual influences of major sublexical cues that readers use to assign stress in single-word reading in English and (b) determining how these cues may interact with contextual stress factors in sentence reading. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3 we investigated the effects of prefixation, orthographic weight (i.e., number of letters in a syllable), and vowel length on stress assignment by asking participants to read aloud carefully-constructed nonwords that varied on the presence of these cues. Results revealed individual effects of all three cues on the assignment of second-syllable stress. In Experiment 4, we tested the effects of these cues on stress assignment in the context of sentence reading. Results showed that sublexical cues influenced stress assignment over and above higher-level syntactic and rhythmic cues. We consider these findings in the framework of extant rule-based, distributed-connectionist, and Bayesian approaches to stress assignment in reading aloud, and we discuss their applications to understanding reading development and acquired and developmental reading disorders.

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

“…In the remaining 20% of cases, typically only one grapheme deviates from its most frequent pronunciation (e.g., pint, have, chef ; see Section 1.4.2.2). However, most of the work on spelling-sound relationships has been conducted with monosyllables; researchers are only just beginning to consider spelling-sound relations in letter strings with more than one syllable (e.g., Ktori, Mousikou, & Rastle, 2018; Mousikou, Sadat, Lucas, & Rastle, 2017; Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010).…”

No evidence for prosodic effects on the syntactic encoding of complement clauses in German

“…This may seem paradoxical because written language generally lacks explicit cues to prosodic structure (e.g. Chafe 1988), but see Evertz & Primus (2013) and Ktori et al (2018) on sublexical cues to word stress. In any case, psycholinguistic research strongly suggests that readers have immediate access to prosodic features like stress (Ashby & Clifton 2005) when reading words, and they make use of this information when parsing sentences (Bader 1996;Breen & Clifton 2011;Kentner 2012;Kentner & Vasishth 2016).…”

The role of orthographic cues to stress in Italian visual word recognition

“…Posterior probabilities are provided, for example, by lexical information and by sublexical orthographic cues, such as stress neighbourhood or diacritics. Similarly, Ktori et al (2018) explored the different types of sublexical cues to English nonword reading as instances of posterior probabilities and examined different models to see which one better simulated the data. Their data came from a megastudy of word reading of English nonwords (Mousikou et al, 2017).…”