The processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition: Typicality effects and orthographic correlates

Abstract

Many studies that have examined reading at the single-word level have been restricted to the processing of monosyllabic stimuli, and, as a result, lexical stress has not been widely investigated. In the experiments reported here, we used disyllabic words and nonwords to investigate the processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found an effect of stress typicality in naming and lexical decision. Typically stressed words (trochaic nouns and iambic verbs) elicited fewer errors than atypically stressed words (iambic nouns and trochaic verbs). In Experiment 3, we carried out an analysis of 340 word endings and found clear orthographic correlates of both grammatical category and lexical stress in word endings. In Experiment 4, we demonstrated that readers are sensitive to these cues in their processing of nonwords during two tasks: sentence construction and stress assignment. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to psycholinguistic models of single-word reading.

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

“…However, some empirical studies showed that grammatical category may be a cue to stress. In both English (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006) and Russian (Jouravlev & Lupker, 2014), an interaction was found between grammatical category and stress neighborhood. Arciuli and Cupples (2006) argued that their results support the claim that orthographic units cue simultaneously the grammatical category and the stress pattern they are typically associated with.…”

“…According to a recent corpus analysis (Monaghan, Arciuli, & Seva, 2016), word beginnings, though less predictive than word endings, are good predictors of stress patterns in several languages, including Italian. Importantly, the role of both beginnings and endings in stress assignment seems to be independent from the morphological properties of those units (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006. That said, it is known that affixes either repel or attract stress (e.g., Jarmulowicz, Taran, & Hay, 2008;Ktori, Tree, Mousikou, Coltheart, & Rastle, 2016;Rastle & Coltheart, 2000), suggesting an important role for morphology in stress assignment.…”

“…Some studies conducted in languages other than Italian suggest that both grammatical category and word beginnings may have a role in driving stress assignment. Using both reading aloud and lexical decision tasks, Arciuli and Cupples (2006) and Jouravlev and Lupker (2014) found that grammatical category interacts with stress neighborhood in English and Russian, respectively (for English see also Kelly, 1988;Kelly & Bock, 1988;Smith et al 1982). Arciuli and collaborators also found that not only word endings but also word beginnings affect English stress assignment in both adults (Arciuli & Cupples, 2007) and children (Arciuli, Monaghan, & Seva, 2010).…”

“…Adjectives stand half-way between nouns and verbs (76.2%), while adverbs are the most biased towards penultimate stress (95.3%). In sum, Italian shows some variability in the distribution of stress patterns within grammatical categories; however, while languages like English show a preference for the dominant (first-syllable) stress pattern in disyllabic nouns and a preference for the nondominant (second-syllable) stress pattern in disyllabic verbs (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006;, the dominant pattern is always preferred in all grammatical categories in Italian. Besides, all categories except adverbs are in line with the overall tendency of a decrease of penultimate stress patterns with the increase of number of syllables.…”

“…Besides, first syllable stress is also the typical pattern of English nouns -verbs, on the contrary, show a bias towards second syllable stress, as in adVISE (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006;Kelly & Bock, 1988;Sereno, 1986). Finally, most English words ending in -ice bear stress on the first syllable (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006).…”