When orthography is not enough: The effect of lexical stress in lexical decision

Three lexical decision experiments were carried out in Italian, in order to verify if stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) had an effect on polysyllabic word recognition. Two factors were manipulated: whether the target word carried stress on the penultimate (dominant; "graNIta," "seNIle"-slush, senile) or on the antepenultimate (non-dominant) syllable ("MISsile," "BIbita"-missile, drink), and whether the stress neighborhood was consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or inconsistent (seNIle, BIbita) with the word's stress pattern. In Experiment 1, words were mixed with nonwords sharing the word endings, which made words and nonwords more similar to each other. In Experiment 2, words and nonwords were presented in lists blocked for stress pattern. In Experiment 3, we used a new set of nonwords, which included endings with (stress) ambiguous neighborhoods and/or with a low number of neighbors, and which were overall less similar to words. In all three experiments, there was an advantage for words with penultimate (dominant) stress and no main effect of stress neighborhood. However, the dominant stress advantage decreased in Experiments 2 and 3. Finally, in Experiment 4, the same materials used in Experiment 1 were also used in a reading-aloud task, showing a significant consistency effect but no dominant stress advantage. The influence of stress information in Italian word recognition is discussed.