The representation of lexical stress in English orthography: Evidence from online lexical processing tasks

Low frequency words in English show a regularity effect; words whose spellings represent regular phonemic patterns like mint show advantages in naming and lexical decision tasks over words like pint that have exceptional relations between orthographic and phonemic patterns. Recently studies have shown that English marks a word\u27s lexical stress in addition to its segmental phonology. Here, it is shown that the regularity effects found in the domain of segmental phonology can be extended to the domain of lexical stress. Disyllabic words whose spellings are consistent with their stress (regular words) are easier to process than words whose spellings are misleading about stress (exception words). Experiment 1 demonstrates that in a word naming task, regular words are named faster and are pronounced with incorrect stress less often than exception words. Experiments 2 and 3 show that regular words are also classified more quickly and accurately in lexical decision tasks than are exception words. Similar results were found in the domain of word production using a newly developed typing task designed to measure spelling response times. Subjects were faster to initiate typing, and made fewer errors on regular than on exception words. These results indicate that literate speakers have learned orthographic correlates to lexical stress in English and use these correlates in online lexical processing. The similarity between the regularity effects found in the phonemic and prosodic domains, indicate that models of reading developed for the former, could be extended to the latter area