Stress in Context: Morpho-Syntactic Properties Affect Lexical Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Grammatical categories influence stress assignment in English and Russian.
• Reader sensitivity to smaller morpho-syntactic differences in stress assignment is unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate Italian readers' sensitivity to morpho-syntactic properties in stress assignment.
• Determine if grammatical category or stress neighbors are prioritized in Italian word and non-word reading.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments using Italian word and non-word reading tasks.
• Context words induced specific morpho-syntactic properties.
• Examined stress processing and assignment.

Main Results:

• Grammatical category proportions did not impact stress processing in word reading.
• Morpho-syntactic properties of context words outweighed stress neighborhood in non-word reading.
• Congruent stress neighbors play a primary role in stress assignment.

Conclusions:

• Italian readers may not utilize general grammatical category information for stress.
• Morpho-syntactic congruence in stress neighbors is crucial for stress assignment, particularly in non-word reading.
• Current single-word reading models may not fully explain these findings.