Early markers of lexical stress in visual word recognition

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in visual word recognition. To this aim we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a simple lexical decision task in Italian. Two factors were manipulated: Stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and stress neighborhood consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern). Participants were presented with target words either bearing dominant (on the penultimate syllable; 'graNIta,' 'seNIle,' slush, senile) or non-dominant stress (on the antepenultimate syllable; 'MISsile,' 'BIbita,' missile, drink), and either having a consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or an inconsistent stress neighborhood (seNIle, BIbita). Our results showed in the initial stages of processing an effect that we interpreted as an early orthographic marker of stress neighborhood in interaction with dominance. Later, from 250 ms after target onset, a marker of the lexical stress difference also emerged. The role of stress assignment in word recognition is discussed.

Lexical stress representation in spoken word recognition.

“…In Dutch, Cutler and van Donselaar (2001) found that participants were less likely to reject a spoken pseudoword when the onset matched a real word both segmentally and in terms of stress than when it only matched segmentally. In Italian, Colombo and Sulpizio (2015;Sulpizio & Colombo, 2017) found that visually presented target words with the dominant stress pattern were responded to faster and more accurately than words with nondominant stress.…”

Retrieving L2 word stress from orthography: Evidence from word naming and cross-modal priming

“…These stress pattern distributions are mirrored in stress assignment performances (Colombo, 1992;Sulpizio & Colombo, 2017), as shown by studies investigating the interaction of word frequency and stress regularities in naming latencies of disyllabic words in L1 English (e.g., Monsell et al, 1989;Kelly et al, 1998) and in L1 Italian (Colombo, 1992;Colombo & Zevin, 2009;Sulpizio, Burani, & Colombo, 2015). When stress is defined as default on the first syllable of disyllabic words, as suggested by the studies of Chateau and Jared (2003), and Yap and Balota (2009), effects of regularity are found only in low frequency words and errors (Colombo, 1992;Perry et al, 2010).…”

The role of morphology in word naming in Spanish-speaking children

“…There are at least two major differences that make comparison of our explanation and that put forward by Traficante et al (2011) difficult. Unlike Spanish, stress assignment is not usually orthographically marked in Italian and is unpredictable for words longer than two syllables (Colombo, 1992; Colombo & Zevin, 2009; Sulpizio & Colombo, 2017; Wilson, Ellis, & Burani, 2012). Moreover, the addition of a suffix might also imply the reassignment of the stress of the word (Traficante et al, 2011).…”