INSTRUMENTO DE RECOLECCIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN

The hypothesis that orthography can implicitly provide information about stress patterns has been extended from word onsets and codas to orthographic elements of greater length: word endings and word beginnings. Most of the research concentrated on investigating the validity of word endings as stress cues. For a disyllabic word, word ending is defined as a fragment that includes a vowel of the second syllable and all following consonants (e.g., wind-ow; prod-uce; nam-ing). Words with the same

orthographic component in their structure are assumed to form neighborhoods (e.g., in English, mark-et, brack-et, pack-et, bask-et, cad-et). Words with identical endings that

map onto the same stress pattern are called “stress friends” (e.g., market: bracket). Words with identical endings that do not map onto the same stress pattern are called “stress enemies” (e.g., market: cadet). A word like “market” that has many “stress friends” is called consistent, while a word like “cadet” that has many “stress enemies” is called inconsistent.

The consistency with which graphemes map onto phonemes has been investigated in monosyllabic word reading (Jared, McRae, & Seidenberg, 1990; Jared, 2002), and it has been demonstrated that words with a high degree of consistency enjoy a processing advantage. Colombo (1992) extended this idea to the domain of polysyllabic word reading (in Italian) and proposed that the consistency of a word’s orthography-to-stress mapping may have an effect on stress assignment. The presence of common letter clusters in words with different stress patterns (“stress enemies”) may slow down the assignment of the correct stress due to the competition from partially activated,

An experimental investigation of the consistency effect in Italian demonstrated an interaction of consistency and regularity of stress (Colombo, 1992). The processing of regularly stressed words with many stress enemies was not slower than the processing of regularly stressed words with many friends. Only irregularly stressed words were subject to the influence of orthography-to-stress mapping consistency. When words with

irregular stress pattern had many stress friends, that fact compensated for its irregularity with naming latencies being the same as the latencies of regularly stressed words. On the other hand, words with irregular stress patterns that had many stress enemies required more time for naming and were more likely to be pronounced with an incorrect stress pattern (Experiment 4, Colombo, 1992). Further, the reliance of readers on the knowledge of the overall distribution of stress patterns in the language and the distribution of stress patterns in words forming neighborhoods has been demonstrated in a nonword naming experiment (Experiment 5, Colombo, 1992). Thus, according to Colombo, there are two factors that influence stress assignment in Italian. The first factor is stress regularity: the most frequent stress pattern can be assigned by default. The second factor is stress consistency as defined by the distribution of stress patterns in a word’s orthographic neighborhood formed on the basis of the orthography of the word’s ending.

Burani and Arduino (2004) criticized Colombo’s (1992) experiments on the grounds of an inappropriate matching of items on a number of variables including

summed frequency of stress friends and initial phoneme characteristics. The performance of readers on naming of better matched Italian words that varied in stress consistency of word endings and stress regularity showed a significant consistency effect in both

and with fewer mistakes than words that had many stress enemies. There was, however, neither a regularity effect nor a consistency by regularity interaction.

There have been a number of replications of the effect of stress consistency of word endings in Italian. For example, in a naming study by Sulpizio, Arduino, Paizi, and Burani (2013), participants were sensitive to stress cues provided by word endings, although this sensitivity was greater for endings associated with the irregular (in Italian) antepenultimate stress pattern. Further, the effect of stress neighborhood on naming was also demonstrated in typically developing and developmental dyslexic Italian children (Paizi et al., 2011). Both participant groups read words with many stress friends more accurately than words with many stress enemies. These results suggest that stress assignment in Italian is driven by distributional information about the consistency of the stress pattern and the orthography of word endings.

Performance on regularly and irregularly stressed words with different degrees of stress consistency was also examined in English (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006; 2007; Arciuli et al., 2010). A large scale analysis of the corpus of disyllabic English words revealed that the orthography of many word endings is probabilistically associated with lexical stress (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006). For example, words ending in “-ock” tend to have a trochaic stress pattern (e.g., hammock, bullock, pollock), while words ending in “-oon” tend to have iambic stress pattern (e.g., baboon, lagoon, maroon). In fact, a discriminant function analysis of an English disyllabic corpus showed that the correct classification of word stress types based on the orthography of word endings occurred in 95% of cases. Further, adult and child participants were shown to be sensitive to the probabilistic stress cues provided by word endings (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006; Arciuli et al., 2010).

As noted, recently, it has been suggested that not only word endings, but also word beginnings, can serve as useful stress cues (Arciuli & Cupples, 2007; Arciuli et al., 2010). The word beginning of a disyllabic word is defined as the segment containing all graphemes up to and including the first vowel (e.g., fo-rmer, mo-del, e-nding). An analysis of the corpus of English disyllabic words showed that some word beginnings occur more often in trochaically stressed words, whereas other word beginnings occur more often in iambically stressed words (Arciuli & Cupples, 2007). In addition, the results of a discriminant function analysis with word beginnings considered as the only criterion for stress classification demonstrated that the correct grouping of words into trochaic versus iambic stress occurred in 90% of cases (Arciuli et al., 2010). In follow-up studies, empirical evidence was obtained showing that when reading nonwords

containing orthographic cues to stress adults and children were sensitive to beginnings as well as endings (Arciuli & Cupples, 2007; Arciuli et al., 2010).

In summary, even in languages that do not use explicit orthographic markers of stress (i.e. diacritics), there are certain orthographic patterns that signal what stress type should be assigned to a word. Word beginnings and endings were empirically shown to be utilized as stress cues by readers. The limitation of these findings is that they were reported in a few languages only. To allow for greater generalization of the idea that lexical stress decisions can be made based on orthographic information, investigations of the role of orthography in stress assignment in other languages are needed.