Q2Stress: A database for multiple cues to stress assignment in Italian

Abstract

In languages where the position of lexical stress within a word is not predictable from print, readers rely on distributional information extracted from the lexicon in order to assign stress. Lexical databases are thus especially important for researchers willing to address stress assignment in those languages. Here we present Q2Stress, a new database aimed to fill the lack of such a resource for Italian. Q2Stress includes multiple cues readers may use in assigning stress, such as type and token frequency of stress patterns as well as their distribution with respect to number of syllables, grammatical category, word beginnings, word endings, and consonant-vowel structures. Furthermore, for the first time, data for both adults and children are available. Q2Stress may help researchers to answer empirical as well as theoretical questions about stress assignment and stress-related issues, and more in general, to explore the orthography-tophonology relation in reading. Q2Stress is designed as a user-friendly resource, as it comes with scripts allowing researchers to explore and select their own stimuli according to several criteria as well as summary tables for overall data analysis.

Learning to assign stress in a second language: The role of second-language vocabulary size and transfer from the native language in second-language readers of Italian

“…Twenty-four final sequences were extracted from Q2Stress (Spinelli et al, 2017). Of these, eight sequences (-amo, -ani, -era, -eri, -ina, -ino, -ita, -ore) had a penultimate stress neighborhood, eight (-ere, -ica, -ico, -ide, -idi, -ole, -oli, -ono) had an antepenultimate stress neighborhood, and eight (-afo, -odo, -oga, -omi, -oro, -ubo, -uce, -uge) had an ambivalent stress neighborhood.…”

“…These measures are based on the total number of multi-syllabic words sharing a specific ending considering all possible stress patterns for that ending. Endings with diacritic marks (e.g., -erà) were not included in these calculations (see Spinelli et al, 2017). Sequences with penultimate and antepenultimate stress neighborhoods were matched on frequency counts of stress neighborhood (Sulpizio et al, 2013), both in terms of the percentage of words sharing the stress pattern of the neighborhood out of the total words ending with that sequence, and the number of words sharing the stress pattern of the neighborhood (see Table 1).…”

“…In Italian, stress position in multi-syllabic words is typically unmarked in the orthography (final-stress words do bear a diacritic mark, e.g., città 'town', but these comprise fewer than 5% of words: Spinelli, Sulpizio & Burani, 2017). Italian readers must, therefore, use other sources of information to assign stress.…”

“…Stress dominance refers to the most frequent stress pattern in a language (Brown et al, 1994; Colombo, 1992; Rastle and Coltheart, 2000). In Italian, most multi-syllabic words – 77% – are stressed on the penultimate, or second-to-last, syllable (pePIte, ‘nuggets’), whereas 18% of words are stressed on the antepenultimate, or third-to-last, syllable (BAMbola, ‘doll’; Spinelli et al, 2017; Thornton, Iacobini & Burani, 1997). Notably, the prevalence of the penultimate stress pattern is not restricted to the cases falling under the rule mentioned above.…”

Early markers of lexical stress in visual word recognition

“…In Colombo and Sulpizio's study, words had either penultimateor antepenultimate-stress and either a consistent or an inconsistent stress neighborhood. Note that in Italian, which is a polysyllabic free-stress language, the two main stress patterns have an asymmetric distribution, with about 75% of threesyllables bearing stress on the penultimate syllable, and 18% bearing stress on the antepenultimate syllable 2 (Spinelli, Sulpizio, & Burani, 2016). Moreover, and more importantly, stress is not governed by rule, 3 and although it is to some extent predictable on the basis of the final sequence, the process of stress assignment cannot be based on rules or regularities, with stress being correctly assigned only through lexical mediation.…”