Priming lexical stress in reading Italian aloud.

Two naming experiments using lexical priming were conducted to investigate how stress information is processed in reading Italian aloud. In the experiments, word primes and targets either shared the stress pattern, or they had different stress patterns. The hypothesis was that lexical activation of the prime would favor the assignment of a congruent stress to the target word. Results show that participants were faster in naming low-frequency target words that had the same stress pattern as the prime, than in naming targets with a different stress than the prime. Similar effects were found on word targets that were included in lists in which primes and targets had the same stress type (experiment 1), and in lists that were mixed for stress type and congruency (experiment 2). The results indicate that, in single word reading, metrical information about stress position is activated in the lexicon, autonomously from phonemic segmental information