Development of Processing Stress Diacritics in Reading Greek

Abstract

In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the developmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2 to 4. Ninety children read 108 pseudowords presented without or with a diacritic either in the same or in a different position relative to the source word. Half of the pseudowords resembled the words they were derived from. Results showed that lexical sources of stress assignment were active in Grade 2 and remained stronger than the diacritic through Grade 4. The effect of the diacritic increased more rapidly and approached the lexical effect with increasing grade. In a second experiment, 90 children read 54 words and 54 pseudowords. The pattern of results for words was similar to that for nonwords suggesting that findings regarding stress assignment using nonwords may generalize to word reading. Decoding of the diacritic does not appear to be the preferred option for developing readers.

Accent mark and visual word recognition in Spanish

“…On the contrary, a misplaced accent mark in the Misplaced condition (e.g., lapíz) significantly slowed down the word recognition, in comparison with the Baseline condition. These results are in agreement with Protopapas and Gerakaki (2009), who reported that the effect of removing the accent mark is weaker than the effect of misplacing it. As concluded by Protopapas (in press), the accent mark "needs not be processed to recognize and pronounce the word correctly" (p. 13), but the accent mark "does become part of the orthographic image of the words, so that its misplacement can affect orthographic processing" (p. 13).…”

Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

“…The word-specific, rather than abstract metrical, representation of lexical stress may also account for an effect observed with Greek children in the elementary grades, namely that words carrying an inappropriate diacritic (on the vowel of an unstressed, rather than the stressed, syllable) were read more slowly than words with the diacritic appropriately placed, but words without a diacritic were read equally fast (Protopapas & Gerakaki, 2009). The omission of the diacritic is a frank spelling error and arguably deprives the printed word of its stress information, if we assume that a metrical frame must be constructed based on the position of the diacritic.…”

“…Unstressed vowels exhibit only limited centralization (i.e., tendency to neutral articulation) and, crucially, there is no phonological vowel reduction associated with lack of stress (Arvaniti, 2007;Fourakis, Botinis, & Katsaiti, 1999). The Greek orthography is relatively transparent at the grapheme-phoneme level (estimated consistency 95% for reading and 80% for spelling; Protopapas & Vlahou, 2009 (Protopapas & Gerakaki, 2009). …”

“…Indeed, the theoretical interpretations considered by Schild et al (2014a) did not concern abstract metrical templates but phoneme-free prosodic representations that is, representations of prosodic acoustic cues (specifically, pitch) that may contribute to word identification. The dominance of specific lexical items, rather than abstract templates, in the activation of stress patterns in Greek is also suggested by pseudoword reading experiments with children and adults (Protopapas & Gerakaki, 2009;Protopapas, Gerakaki, & Alexandri, 2006. Specifically, when faced with a pseudoword that differs minimally from a known word (usually by a single letter), Greek readers from Grade 2 through adulthood preferentially assign the stress pattern of the known word even when it conflicts with the stress diacritic clearly displayed on the pseudoword.…”

“…Omission did not affect performance but misplaced diacritics resulted in a small delay (Protopapas & Gerakaki, 2009). No metrical representation is necessary in this interpretation because the stress match or mismatch may occur entirely within the orthographic representation of the word, which presumably includes the diacritic.…”