Spinelli, G;
Sulpizio, S;
Primativo, S;
Burani, C;
(2016)
Stress in Context: Morpho-Syntactic Properties Affect Lexical Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud.
Frontiers in Psychology
, 7
10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00942.
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Stress in Context: Morpho-Syntactic Properties Affect Lexical Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00942 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00942 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2016 Spinelli, Sulpizio, Primativo and Burani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCBY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1507805 |
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