Stress matters revisited: A boundary change experiment

Abstract

Breen and Clifton (Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 2011, 64, 153–170) argued that readers’ eye movements during silent reading are influenced by the stress patterns of words. This claim was supported by the observation that syntactic reanalysis that required concurrent metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of abstract to the verb form) resulted in longer reading times than syntactic reanalysis that did not require metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of report to the verb form). However, the data contained a puzzle: The disruption appeared on the critical word (abstract, report) itself, although the material that forced the part of speech change did not appear until the next region. Breen and Clifton argued that parafoveal preview of the disambiguating material triggered the revision and that the eyes did not move on until a fully specified lexical representation of the critical word was achieved. The present experiment used a boundary change paradigm in which parafoveal preview of the disambiguating region was prevented. Once again, an interaction was observed: Syntactic reanalysis resulted in particularly long reading times when it also required metrical reanalysis. However, now the interaction did not appear on the critical word, but only following the disambiguating region. This pattern of results supports Breen and Clifton's claim that readers form an implicit metrical representation of text during silent reading.

Keywords:

• Implicit prosody
• Eye tracking
• Reading
• Metrical stress

This project was supported in part by Grant Number HD18708 from NICHD to the University of Massachusetts. The authors would like to thank Sierra Greaves for help with stimulus preparation, Dan Petty, Brittany Stepton, Adina Galili, Erin Ackley, and Brittany McArdle with data collection and analysis, and Denis Drieghe, one anonymous reviewer, and the audience of the 25th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing for helpful discussion and feedback. The contents of this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NICHD or NIH.