Lexical stress and its interaction with frequency in word pronunciation

Stress assignment in reading words aloud is investigated. Three-syllable Italian words with regular or irregular stress and high or low frequencies were presented in a naming task and in a lexical decision task. With low-frequency words, naming times for regular stressed words were faster than for words with irregular stress, whereas no difference was found for high-frequency words. Instead, in the lexical decision task the interaction between stress and frequency was significant for errors but not for reaction times (RTs). Exps 4 and 5 investigated the effect of neighborhood in pronouncing words and nonwords. In Exp 6, words were presented in a delayed naming task to investigate the effects of stress and frequency on the implementation of the motor program for production. The results suggest that the production phase of the naming process might be to some extent involved in the assignment of stress