ORTHOGRAPHIC CUES TO LEXICAL STRESS - EFFECTS ON NAMING AND LEXICAL DECISION

Words whose spellings represent regular phonemic patterns, such as min t, show advantages in naming and lexical decision tasks over words, su ch as pint, that have exceptional relations between orthographic and p honemic patterns. We have extended such phenomena to the domain of lex ical stress, by showing that disyllabic words whose spellings are cons istent with their stress are easier to process than words whose spelli ngs are misleading about stress. Such words are named more quickly and are pronounced with incorrect stress less often (Experiment 1). They are also classified more quickly and accurately in lexical decision ta sks (Experiments 2 and 3). These results indicate that literate speake rs have learned orthographic correlates to lexical stress in English. In addition, the similarities between results in the phonemic and pros odic domains indicate that models of reading developed for the former could be extended to the latter area.