Lexical access in Portuguese stress

Abstract

Categorical approaches to lexical stress typically assume that words have either regular or irregular stress, and imply that only the latter needs to be stored in the lexicon, while the former can be derived by rule. In this paper, we compare these two groups of words in a lexical decision task in Portuguese to examine whether the dichotomy in question affects lexical retrieval latencies in native speakers, which could indirectly reveal different processing patterns. Our results show no statistically credible effect of stress regularity on reaction times, even when lexical frequency, neighborhood density, and phonotactic probability are taken into consideration. The lack of an effect is consistent with a probabilistic approach to stress, not with a categorical (traditional) approach where syllables are either light or heavy and stress is either regular or irregular. We show that the posterior distribution of credible effect sizes of regularity is almost entirely (96.28%) within the region of practical equivalence, which provides strong evidence that no effect of regularity exists in the lexical decision data modelled. Frequency and phonotactic probability, in contrast, showed statistically credible effects given the experimental data modelled, which is consistent with the literature.

Current issues in Portuguese main and secondary stress

“…In the first half of this chapter, we examined an approach to primary stress in which stress is assumed to be assigned probabilistically and subsequently lexically stored. Such an approach is more accurate, more comprehensive, and seems to be aligned with psycholinguistic data (e.g., Garcia and Guzzo (2022))-recall that only weight-sensitivity was employed in the approach in question, which means that additional phonologically relevant factors would likely increase the accuracy of the approach. Crucially, a probabilistic approach is by definition more aligned with the non-categorical nature of phonological data.…”

“…A probabilistic approach, on the other hand, predicts no difference. Garcia and Guzzo (2022) investigate this question with a lexical decision task controlling for weight, stress, frequency, phonotactic probability, and neighbourhood density (e.g., Cutler (2012); Vitevitch et al (1999); Vitevitch and Rodríguez (2005)). In their task, stress regularity (given weight-sensitivity) was employed as a predictor of reaction times, thus mirroring categorical approaches.…”

“…Using Bayesian models, Garcia and Guzzo (2022) show that the regularity of a given stress-weight combination had no effect on reaction times: over 97% of the posterior distribution of the predictor in question was contained within the region of practical equivalence (ROPE). Simply put, if an entire posterior distribution is within the ROPE (see, e.g., Kruschke (2015)), we would have statistical evidence for a null effect (cf.…”