Abstract
Recent findings from English and Russian have shown that grammatical category plays a key role in stress assignment. In these languages, some grammatical categories have a typical stress pattern and this information is used by readers. However, whether readers are sensitive to smaller distributional differences and other morpho-syntactic properties (e.g., gender, number, person) remains unclear. We addressed this issue in word and non-word reading in Italian, a language in which: (1) nouns and verbs differ in the proportion of words with a dominant stress pattern; (2) information specified by words sharing morpho-syntactic properties may contrast with other sources of information, such as stress neighborhood. Both aspects were addressed in two experiments in which context words were used to induce the desired morpho-syntactic properties. Experiment 1 showed that the relatively different proportions of stress patterns between grammatical categories do not affect stress processing in word reading. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that information specified by words sharing morpho-syntactic properties outweighs stress neighborhood in non-word reading. Thus, while general information specified by grammatical categories may not be used by Italian readers, stress neighbors with morpho-syntactic properties congruent with those of the target stimulus have a primary role in stress assignment. These results underscore the importance of expanding investigations of stress assignment beyond single words, as current models of single-word reading seem unable to account for our results.
Highlights
Recent years have seen a growing interest in how readers assign lexical stress to both known and novel words
As materials were designed to compare penultimate and antepenultimate stress words within each grammatical category, verbs and nouns were analyzed separately; for each category, the same analyses with morpho-syntactic context, word stress, and stress neighborhood consistency as predictors were performed; over and above the variables of interest, familiarity was included as a covariate
In line with previous studies using nouns (Burani and Arduino, 2004; Burani et al, 2014), we reported no significant differences between penultimate and antepenultimate stress nouns when stress neighborhood was controlled, and the use of context did not change such pattern
Summary
Recent years have seen a growing interest in how readers assign lexical stress to both known and novel words This is especially true for free-stress languages such as English or Italian, where stress is neither orthographically marked nor predictable based on rules. A few studies investigating reading in English and Russian (Arciuli and Cupples, 2006; Jouravlev and Lupker, 2014) reported an effect of stress typicality (i.e., the dominant pattern within a grammatical category). They found that grammatical categories play a role in stress assignment, and interact with stress neighborhood. Atypically stressed adjectives (i.e., iambic) were disadvantaged, especially when stress neighborhood was inconsistent
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