Development of processing stress diacritics in reading Greek

In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the devel-opmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2–4. 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. The cognitive processes of reading have received substantial attention over the past decades. Researchers working primar-ily in English, but also in other languages as well, have begun to elucidate the mechanisms and representations involved in reading aloud printed words and, to some extent, in com-prehending text. The main focus has been on a presumed transformation between the visual perception of (sequences of) letters (graphemes) and the phonological specification of (sequences of) segments (phonemes). The study of how graphemes are decoded into phonemes, and of how whole words in one’s “sight vocabulary ” are recognized has largely occupied the research effort devoted to reading. Aspects of reading performance not directly involved in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or word recognition have generally re-ceived less attention. Thus, comparatively little is known re-garding suprasegmental aspects of reading, such as assign-ing stress or appropriate intonation (but see recent work i