The Role of Lexical Stress in Word Reading

• In Event: Poster Session 3
  In Poster Session: Approaches to Fostering Reading Proficiency in Classroom Contexts

Abstract

To investigate the role of lexical stress in word identification, we controlled for phoneme, stress, and syllable information in an English spelling judgment task performed by 51 adults. Accuracy rates were generally higher for two-syllable than for three-syllable words, but only if the misspelling occurred in an unstressed syllable: misspellings in stressed syllables were caught just as often in three-syllable as in two-syllable words. In addition, misspellings that occurred in stressed syllables were detected more often overall than misspellings that occurred in unstressed syllables, though not in the subset of words whose misspellings altered their pronunciations. Taken together, these findings suggest that stress plays a crucial role in word reading, especially when phonemic information is unreliable.

Authors

• Lindsay Harris, Northern Illinois University

• Juan Zhang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Charles Perfetti, University of Pittsburgh