Word Stress in German Single-Word Reading

Abstract

This article reports a lexical-decision experiment that was conducted to investigate the impact of word stress on visual word recognition in German. Reaction-time latencies and error rates of German readers on different levels of reading proficiency (i.e., third graders and fifth graders from primary school and university students) were compared in order to shed light on the role of word stress during reading and reading acquisition. Results show that word stress has a significant effect on the performance of third and fifth grade readers and thus influences single-word reading in at least some stages of reading acquisition.

Notes

¹Stressed syllables are written in bold.

²The experiment was also run with a group of 15 second graders (M_age 6;9 years) at the beginning of their second year in primary school. With a mean error rate of 48.3%, their performance was only at chance level, which suggests that they were not able to read the presented words within a presentation period of eight seconds and based their responses on guessing. Therefore, the data of this group was not evaluated.

³The corresponding figures without these three pairs are mean frequency of words with regular stress: 99.8, SD = 184.4; mean frequency of words with irregular stress: 105.3, SD = 227.8, t(16) < 1; and mean letter number regular stress: 5.2, SD = 0.83; mean letter number irregular stress: 5.67, SD = 0.71, t(16) = 1.512, p = 0.169.

⁴First steps in reading instructions in German primary schools focus on the articulation of single-letter graphemes as sounds that are assembled to derive the phonological form of a printed word (cf. Röber, 2008, p. 2). The fact that letters can be grouped in orthographic syllables to allow for the assignment of stress patterns is, in contrast, usually not taught explicitly in the reading instructions in primary school.