THE TYPE NUMEROSITY OF STRESS ”FRIENDS” SPEEDS UP READING ALOUD OF ITALIAN WORDS WITH LESS FREQUENT STRESS PATTERN Cristina Burani Institute for Sciences and Technologies of Cognition, CNR, Rome Lisa S. Arduino University of Milano-Bicocca Inst. for Sciences and Technologies of Cognition, CNR, Rome The Third International Conference on the Mental Lexicon Banff, Alberta, Canada October 6-8, 2002

MATITA (pencil) For stress assignment: Lexical look-up 80%20% RegularIrregular BUT: Proportion in the Italian language: BIBITA (drink)

Colombo (1992), JEP: HPP Regularity x Frequency interaction (see also Balota & Ferraro, 1993, JML) Prediction: Regular Irregular stress stress High Freq. = Low Freq. < Regular stress as default rule

Colombo, 1992 ( JEP:HPP ). Exp. 3

BUT: Regular stress Irregular stress - ORO 81 % (castòro)19% (fòsforo) - OLA 23 % (pistòla)77 % (pèntola) Print-to-sound consistency (see Jared et al., 1990; Jared, 2002; Monaghan & Ellis, 2002; Rastle & Coltheart, 1999) Stress neighborhood (Kelly et al., 1999, M&C)

PREDICTION WORDS WITH MANY “STRESS FRIENDS” are easier to pronounce than WORDS WITH MANY “STRESS ENEMIES” Large number of friend neighbors with irregular stress will reduce the difference between regularly and irregularly stressed words

Colombo (1992) Exp. 4.

Experiment 1 Regular Irregular Many friends Many enemies castòrovìgile fucìlefòsforo Regular and Irregular: same final sequences same Numerosity (types) same summed Frequency (tokens) LIST COMPOSITION: 50% WORDS AND 50% NONWORDS Large families of friends and enemies

Experiment 1 Main effect of stress neighborhood

Further issues If numerosity (types) ( Kelly et al., 1999 ) rather than summed frequency (tokens) ( Jared et al., 1993; Jared, 2002 ) of friends  stress neighborhood effect with words matched for summed frequency and varying for numerosity of friends If stress neighborhood irrespective of stress regularity  words with irregular stress but a larger set of friends should have faster naming latencies relative to words with regular stress but a much smaller set of friends If phonological effect  effect on reading aloud, but not on lexical decision

Experiments 2 & 3 RegularIrregular N-Friends (TYPES) Freq-Friends (TOKENS) Regular and Irregular: same final sequences same summed Frequency (tokens) different Numerosity (types) LIST COMPOSITION: 50% WORDS AND 50% NONWORDS (pistòla)(pèntola)

Exp.2 Reading aloudExp. 3 Lexical decision Exp. 2: Advantage for irregular words with large neighborhood of Friend-types Exp.3: No effect of stress neighborhood

Exp. 1 Large friends to enemies ratio . NO stress regularity effect. Stress consistency or neighborhood effect (on BOTH words with regular and irregular stress). Exp. 2 Friends to enemies ratio in favor of words with irregular stress . Irregularly stressed words are faster. Effect of friend and enemy TYPES (rather than summed frequency of friends and enemies ) Exp. 3 No effect on visual lexical decision --> Facilitation not due to orthographic encoding Summary of results

Conclusions No support for a default “rule”for stress assignment (Colombo, 1992; Rastle & Coltheart, 2000, JML) (at least when stress neighborhood is large enough) The extraction of a relevant unit as a cue to stress assignment is favored when this unit is part of several different word contexts (several word types) Lexical activation of word neighbors, or consistency in print-to-sound mapping of sublexical units? Hard to disentangle the two possibilities Dual and single route models need further development to account for stress assignment to polisyllables