Priming stress patterns in word recognition.

Abstract

This study addresses the lexical representation of stress in a series of five intra-modal and cross-modal priming experiments in the Greek language using lexical decision tasks with auditory and visual targets. Three-syllable primes and targets were matched in first syllable segments, length, and other variables, and differed segmentally in the second and third syllable. Primes matched or mismatched targets in stress, which was placed on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable. There was no evidence for stress priming in either accuracy or latency of responses to either words or pseudowords in any of these experiments, either intra-modally or cross-modally. In contrast, a control fragment priming experiment using only the first two syllables of the primes produced a significant effect of stress congruence for words but not for pseudowords. The results are interpreted in the context of previous findings in the literature as arising from lexical activation rather than from matching stress patterns. Overall, findings are consistent with lexical representations including stress information that is inseparable from segmental specification, rather than with abstract representations of metrical templates.

Derivational suffixes as cues to stress position in reading Greek

“…Our results for Greek are consistent with studies in English, in which probabilistic associations have been documented between word-final letter sequences and stress patterns and, moreover, behavioural evidence indicates that these associations are operative in stress assignment by children and adult readers (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006;Arciuli et al, 2010;Monaghan et al, 2016;Wade-Woolley & Heggie, 2015), subject to a developmental progression that can be accounted for by a statistical (connectionist) model learning to assign stress by exposure to a word corpus (Arciuli et al, 2010). Although the Greek stress system is very different from the English one in many ways, including phonologically, phonetically and orthographically (see, e.g., Protopapas, Panagaki, Andrikopoulou, Gutiérrez Palma, & Arvaniti, 2016), it seems that stress assignment behaviour in both languages is consistent with cumulative effects of probabilistic cues, based on lexical experience and knowledge, rather than absolute stress assignment rules associated with specific morphemes or other units. In particular, our findings do not support the notion that so-called accenting morphemes are strongly associated with specific stress patterns in the sense of strictly determining stress assignment behaviour when reading aloud novel items (pseudowords).…”

“…The processing demands of reading aloud (which involves visual word recognition) may be sufficiently distinct from those of spontaneous word production, or of productive derivation, so that each may depend on partially different representations, at different levels of abstraction and with different formal and statistical properties (cf. Protopapas et al, ).…”

English Learners’ Use of Segmental and Suprasegmental Cues to Stress in Lexical Access: An Eye‐Tracking Study

“…Spoken word recognition is influenced not only by segmental information (e.g., acoustic information from which consonants and vowels are extracted from the signal) but also by suprasegmental information, such as fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and intensity. For example, suprasegmental cues to lexical stress distinguish words and thus constrain lexical access in a number of languages, including Dutch (e.g., van Donselaar, Koster, & Cutler, ), Spanish (e.g., Soto‐Faraco, Sebastián‐Gallés, & Cutler, ), Italian (e.g., Sulpizio & McQueen, ; Tagliapietra & Tabossi, ), Greek (e.g., Protopapas, Panagaki, Andrikopoulou, Gutierrez Palma, & Arvaniti, ), and English (e.g., Cooper, Cutler, & Wales, ). These and other findings have been interpreted as suggesting that suprasegmental information is processed in parallel with segmental information and thus immediately constrains lexical activation and competition (e.g., T. Cho, McQueen, & Cox, ).…”

Intonation and talker variability in the discrimination of Spanish lexical stress contrasts by Spanish, German and French listeners

“…Although the assignment of lexical stress is still a controversial issue, there is a common agreement on the fact that stress patterns, in free-stress languages, are somehow involved in the lexical representations. However, it is unclear whether the stress patterns of all lexical items or only irregular stress patterns are stored, or whether the stress assignment combines the retrieval of a stored representation and the computation of stress patterns on the basis of phonological and/or morphological rules or statistical distribution (Laganaro et al, 2002;Levelt et al, 1999;Protopapas et al, 2016).…”