Lexical stress, frequency, and stress neighbourhood effects in the early stages of Italian reading development

Abstract

We examined the development of stress assignment in reading Italian aloud. We investigated frequency effects as a marker of the use of item-specific lexical knowledge in assigning stress together with stress dominance and stress neighbourhood (the number of words sharing both stress and ending) as markers of distributional information regarding properties of the lexicon extracted from spoken language. We tested second- and fourth-graders in a reading-aloud experiment including high- and low-frequency words and nonwords. Results show that despite the regularity of orthography–phonology mappings in Italian and the predominant use of phonological recoding procedures, item-specific lexical knowledge is also used, even by beginning readers. The frequency effect was significant and did not increase with age, while stress errors on low-frequency words decreased with increasing grade. Stress neighbourhood increasingly affected stress assignment on nonwords with older children. Taken together, our findings show that both item-specific knowledge and general information about stress distribution are relevant in children's reading, suggesting the simultaneous use of both lexical and sublexical information. Moreover, as the reading system develops, and knowledge about the relative distribution of stress neighbourhood increases, larger grain-size units are also exploited.

Keywords:

• Lexical stress
• Reading development
• Stress dominance
• Stress neighbourhood
• Word frequency

The study was supported by a 60% grant from the University of Padua to the second author. The authors wish to thank Silvia Ravazzolo for running the experiment, Rocco Micciolo and Marco Marelli for their help with data analyses, and three anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback.

Notes

¹ The manuscript is currently available on request.

² Analyses were also carried out with the full set of stimuli, including the two repeated low-frequency words. Results did not differ from those reported in the text.