Orthographic representations of lexical stress in English

Literate English speakers read and write unfamiliar English words with their correct stress patterns. One possible basis for this ability may be the existence of representations of lexical stress in English orthography. It is suggested that orthographic variability may be exploited to represent lexical stress through the addition of silent letters to indicate syllables which are stressed. A series of dictionary analyses examined the possibility that certain orthographic patterns are correlated with stress patterns in real English words. An analysis of the spellings of the final syllables of some disyllabic words revealed that syllables which are stressed contain more letters than final syllables which are unstressed (e.g. angry vs. agree). An analysis of some suffixes suggested that the spelling of the suffix may provide information about the stress pattern of the word which contains it. And a third analysis demonstrated that unstressed function words have shorter spellings than homophonic stressed content words (e.g. in versus inn). Adult subjects were asked to spell disyllabic pseudowords with both first- and second-syllable stress patterns to determine whether they would mark the change in stress in their written representations of the pseudowords. Subjects marked stress by putting more letters in a stressed syllable. In a forced-choice spelling experiment, subjects chose specific word-final spelling distinctions to represent the stress pattern of disyllabic words. In two reading experiments, subjects used spelling changes in the second syllable of disyllabic pseudowords ta determine stress placement when reading the words aloud. It is concluded that people use orthographic representations of stress to pronounce words when reading aloud and suggested that they may access phonological representations en route to the lexicon when reading silently. Given that other cues to stress assignment are available in reading, it is predicted that spelling cues will be found where other cues are misleading. One analysis of disyllabic nouns and verbs demonstrated that English nouns and verbs whose stress patterns are not predictable by the general noun/verb stress difference in English are more likely to contain orthographic markers in the stressed syllable (e.g. gazelle)