Prosodic constraints on lexical access in reading

Abstract

In this paper, the reading responses of six dyslexic subjects are reported and analysed. Some subject's responses are shown to be affected by prosodic factors in two ways: (a) bisyllabic words with stress on the second syllable are significantly more difficult than comparable words with stress on the first syllable; (b) more errors are made to the portion of the target string that corresponds to the stressed syllable. We argue that prosodic factors must constrain the early stages of lexical access since many of the errors could not have occurred at a later output stage. We propose a way in which prosodic factors could be incorporated into models of word recognition, and conclude that visual, as well as phonological, representations are organised in terms of prosodic units.