Q2Stress: A database for multiple cues to stress assignment in Italian

In languages where the position of lexical stress within a word is not predictable from print, readers rely on distributional information extracted from the lexicon in order to assign stress. Lexical databases are thus especially important for researchers willing to address stress assignment in those languages. Here we present Q2Stress, a new database aimed to fill the lack of such a resource for Italian. Q2Stress includes multiple cues readers may use in assigning stress, such as type and token frequency of stress patterns as well as their distribution with respect to number of syllables, grammatical category, word beginnings, word endings, and consonant-vowel structures. Furthermore, for the first time, data for both adults and children are available. Q2Stress may help researchers to answer empirical as well as theoretical questions about stress assignment and stress-related issues, and more in general, to explore the orthography-to-phonology relation in reading. Q2Stress is designed as a user-friendly resource, as it comes with scripts allowing researchers to explore and select their own stimuli according to several criteria as well as summary tables for overall data analysis.

[1]  J. Sereno.  Stress pattern differentiation of form class in English , 1986 .

[2]  Lisa S Arduino,et al.  Stress assignment in reading Italian polysyllabic pseudowords. , 2013, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[3]  Gloria Pérez Belló.  A. M. Thornton, C. Iacobini, C. Burani: BDVDB -Una base di dati sul Vocabulario di Base della Lingua Italiana, Roma, Bulzoni, 1997. , 1998 .

[4]  L. Colombo.  Lexical stress effect and its interaction with frequency in word pronunciation , 1992 .

[5]  L. Colombo,et al.  Lexical Stress, Frequency, and Stress Neighbourhood Effects in the Early Stages of Italian Reading Development , 2013, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[6]  Linda D. Jarmulowicz,et al.  Lexical frequency and third-graders' stress accuracy in derived English word production , 2008, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[7]  Olessia Jouravlev,et al.  Stress consistency and stress regularity effects in Russian , 2014 .

[8]  Padraic Monaghan,et al.  Learning to Assign Lexical Stress during Reading Aloud: Corpus, Behavioral, and Computational Investigations. , 2010 .

[9]  L. Colombo,et al.  The Process of Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud: Critical Issues From Studies on Italian , 2015 .

[10]  Linda Cupples,et al.  The processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition: Typicality effects and orthographic correlates , 2006, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[11]  Carlo Tagliavini,et al.  Lessico di frequenza della lingua Italiana contemporanea , 1972 .

[12]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Stress in time. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[13]  Simone Sulpizio,et al.  Stress in Context: Morpho-Syntactic Properties Affect Lexical Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud , 2016, Front. Psychol..

[14]  L. Colombo,et al.  When orthography is not enough: The effect of lexical stress in lexical decision , 2015, Memory & cognition.

[15]  Lucia Colombo,et al.  Interacting sources of information in word naming: a study of individual differences , 1994 .

[16]  Simone Sulpizio,et al.  Stress assignment in reading Italian: Friendship outweighs dominance , 2013, Memory & Cognition.

[17]  Lisa S Arduino,et al.  Stress regularity or consistency? Reading aloud Italian polysyllables with different stress patterns , 2004, Brain and Language.

[18]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary , 1987 .

[19]  Athanassios Protopapas,et al.  Sources of information for stress assignment in reading Greek , 2007, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[20]  M Coltheart,et al.  DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. , 2001, Psychological review.

[21]  Jeremy Goslin,et al.  PhonItalia: a phonological lexicon for Italian , 2014, Behavior research methods.

[22]  Jasmin Sadat,et al.  Moving beyond the monosyllable in models of skilled reading: Mega-study of disyllabic nonword reading , 2017 .

[23]  Michael C. Doyle,et al.  Effects of frequency on visual word recognition tasks: where are they? , 1989, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[24]  Athanassios Protopapas,et al.  Lexical and Default Stress Assignment in Reading Greek. , 2006 .

[25]  Linda Cupples,et al.  Would you rather 'embert a cudsert' or 'cudsert an embert'? How spelling patterns at the beginning of English disyllables can cue grammatical category , 2007 .

[26]  R. H. Baayen,et al.  The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM) , 1996 .

[27]  Claudio Iacobini,et al.  BDVDB : una base di dati sul vacabolario di base della lingua italiana , 1994 .

[28]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Phonological biases in grammatical category shifts , 1988 .

[29]  M. Coltheart,et al.  Lexical and Nonlexical Print-to-Sound Translation of Disyllabic Words and Nonwords , 2000 .

[30]  Robert G. Baker,et al.  Spelling as a source of information about children's linguistic knowledge , 1982 .

[31]  M. Coltheart,et al.  Prefixes repel stress in reading aloud: Evidence from surface dyslexia , 2016, Cortex.

[32]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Word Onset Patterns and Lexical Stress in English. , 2004 .

[33]  Padraic Monaghan,et al.  Discovering large grain sizes in a transparent orthography: Insights from a connectionist model of Italian word naming , 2010 .

[34]  David Howard,et al.  The effects of lexical stress in aphasic word production , 2002 .

[35]  Padraic Monaghan,et al.  Chapter 10. Cross-Linguistic Evidence for Probabilistic Orthographic Cues to Lexical Stress , 2016 .

[36]  L. Colombo,et al.  Stress priming and statistical learning in Italian nonword reading: evidence from children , 2014 .

[37]  Marco Zorzi,et al.  Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process (CDP++) model , 2010, Cognitive Psychology.