Development of Processing Stress Diacritics in Reading Greek

Abstract

In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the developmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2 to 4. Ninety children read 108 pseudowords presented without or with a diacritic either in the same or in a different position relative to the source word. Half of the pseudowords resembled the words they were derived from. Results showed that lexical sources of stress assignment were active in Grade 2 and remained stronger than the diacritic through Grade 4. The effect of the diacritic increased more rapidly and approached the lexical effect with increasing grade. In a second experiment, 90 children read 54 words and 54 pseudowords. The pattern of results for words was similar to that for nonwords suggesting that findings regarding stress assignment using nonwords may generalize to word reading. Decoding of the diacritic does not appear to be the preferred option for developing readers.

Notes

¹In Greece, children enter first grade upon completing their 6th year of age. Therefore, the ages of Grade 2 children at the time of testing must be in the range of 7;8–8;7 (years;months). The corresponding range for Grade 3 is 8;8–9;7 and for Grade 4 9;8–10;7.

²The “basic vocabulary” is a fixed list of words included in the primary education language textbooks of the national curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1997). These words are encountered frequently in the schoolbooks and are used often for spelling and reading drills throughout the school years. Because of the limited experience of children in these grades with general reading materials, this list is a more reliable source of familiar (high-frequency) written words than printed text corpora.

³These criteria are substantially more lax than the corresponding criteria employed previously with older (Grades 7–9) children (Protopapas et al., 2006) and adults (Protopapas et al., 2007), because very young children evidently produce much more loose associations and stricter criteria would be impractical. For example, approximately half of the children produced a word in response to each completely changed item, whereas almost none of the adults produced any words in the corresponding test of the earlier study. However, the relaxed criterion still serves the intended purpose of ensuring that no particular words are consistently activated by the completely changed nonwords, whereas source words are consistently activated by the minimally changed nonwords.

*p < .005.

**p < .0005