Derivational suffixes as cues to stress position in reading Greek

Abstract

Background In languages with lexical stress, reading aloud must include stress assignment. Stress information sources across languages include word‐final letter sequences. Here, we examine whether such sequences account for stress assignment in Greek and whether this is attributable to absolute rules involving accenting morphemes or to probabilistic lexical information. Methods Pseudowords were constructed to not resemble particular words and were suffixed with derivational morphemes associated with specific stress patterns, to be read aloud, presented either without a stress diacritic or with a diacritic congruent or incongruent with the suffix. Morphemes differed in whether or not there were stress competitors ending in the same letter sequences. Results Stress was assigned consistent with the suffix in the absence of the diacritic, more so when there were no stress competitors in the lexicon. Conclusions Results suggest a lexically based probabilistic mechanism taking into account pattern distributions rather than absolute rules based on the morphological accenting.

Reading Derived Words by Italian Children With and Without Dyslexia: The Effect of Root Length

“…The effect of suffix frequency on the reading accuracy of children, and of children with dyslexia in particular, must have its source on some properties of suffixes in driving pronunciation after starting the pronunciation process. It has been often shown in developmental reading studies that suffixes act as stress attractors (e.g., Jarmulowicz et al, 2007 , 2008 ) and more generally provide a cue to stress position, i.e., to where stress should be placed when pronouncing a word ( Grimani and Protopapas, 2017 ). This is crucial in pronouncing polysyllabic words like Italian derived words, which are usually 3-to-5 syllables long.…”

Reading as Statistical Learning

“…However, each of these alternative orthographic units contained fairly reliable cues to stress indicating the presence of multiple cues. Subsequent behavioral and electrophysiological studies have demonstrated participants' sensitivity to these kinds of probabilistic orthographic cues in languages other than English (e.g., see studies of Italian, Greek, and Russian by Burani & Arduino, 2004;Grimani & Protopapas, 2017;Jouravlev & Lupker, 2014Sulpizio & Colombo, 2017, among others).…”

Chapter 11. From Diacritics to the Mental Lexicon

“…In our study (Grimani & Protopapas, 2009) we focused on derivational morphemes thought to constrain stress, such as -οσύνη /osini/ and -ότητα /otita/ (both meaning -ness/-ity, e.g., καλοσύνη /kaloˈsini/ "kindness", χρησιµότητα /xrisiˈmotita/ "usefulness"). The former bears penultimate-syllable stress whereas the latter bears antepenultimate-syllable stress.…”