Simone Sulpizio

Lexical stress, frequency, and stress neighbourhood effects in the early stages of Italian reading development

We examined the development of stress assignment in reading Italian aloud. We investigated frequency effects as a marker of the use of item-specific lexical knowledge in assigning stress together with stress dominance and stress neighbourhood (the number of words sharing both stress and ending) as markers of distributional information regarding properties of the lexicon extracted from spoken language. We tested second- and fourth-graders in a reading-aloud experiment including high- and low-frequency words and nonwords. Results show that despite the regularity of orthography–phonology mappings in Italian and the predominant use of phonological recoding procedures, item-specific lexical knowledge is also used, even by beginning readers. The frequency effect was significant and did not increase with age, while stress errors on low-frequency words decreased with increasing grade. Stress neighbourhood increasingly affected stress assignment on nonwords with older children. Taken together, our findings show that both item-specific knowledge and general information about stress distribution are relevant in childrens reading, suggesting the simultaneous use of both lexical and sublexical information. Moreover, as the reading system develops, and knowledge about the relative distribution of stress neighbourhood increases, larger grain-size units are also exploited.

Priming lexical stress in reading Italian aloud

Two experiments using a lexical priming paradigm investigated how stress information is processed in reading Italian words. In both experiments, prime and target words either shared the stress pattern or they had different stress patterns. We expected that lexical activation of the prime would favour the assignment of congruent stress to the target. Results showed that participants were faster in naming target words that had the same stress pattern as the prime. Similar effects were found on target words that were included in lists in which all prime and target stimuli had the same stress type (Experiment 1) and in lists with mixed stress type and congruency between primes and targets (Experiment 2). Results indicate that, in single word reading, metrical information about stress position is activated in the lexicon, independent of segmental information.

Stress assignment in reading Italian: Friendship outweighs dominance

Stress assignment to polysyllabic words is the only aspect of the pronunciation of written Italian that cannot be predicted by rule. It could be a function of stress dominance in the language or of stress neighborhood (i.e., the number of words sharing an ending and a stress pattern). In two experiments, we investigated stress assignment in Italian adult and, most importantly, young readers. Word frequency and number of stress friends influenced reading times and accuracy, outweighing any effect of stress dominance. In the presence of a majority of stress friends, the reading of low-frequency words was only affected by stress neighborhood. These effects were the same in fourth graders and adult readers. We argue that distributional information based on the number of stress friends—rather than stress dominance—is the most effective factor in assigning stress to words in reading.

The Process of Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud: Critical Issues From Studies on Italian

In polysyllabic languages the assignment of stress is crucial for understanding the reading process. Here we review empirical evidence, drawn mainly from studies on Italian, and discuss critical issues in understanding reading. We first discuss the lexical and sublexical mechanisms responsible for stress assignment and propose that the former is based on item-specific knowledge and the latter on the statistical-distributional knowledge that readers have acquired about their language. Then we examine the idea that stress and phonemes pertain to two dimensions of the word, which can be placed at two different representational levels. Finally, we analyze the effects of stress assignment on word articulation, a promising field for future investigation. These issues are addressed by reviewing the studies conducted in adult and young readers to outline the developmental trajectory of stress assignment and discuss how it operates in the reading system.

Analyzing spatial data from mouse tracker methodology: An entropic approach

Mouse tracker methodology has recently been advocated to explore the motor components of the cognitive dynamics involved in experimental tasks like categorization, decision-making, and language comprehension. This methodology relies on the analysis of computer-mouse trajectories, by evaluating whether they significantly differ in terms of direction, amplitude, and location when a given experimental factor is manipulated. In this kind of study, a descriptive geometric approach is usually adopted in the analysis of raw trajectories, where they are summarized with several measures, such as maximum-deviation and area under the curve. However, using raw trajectories to extract spatial descriptors of the movements is problematic due to the noisy and irregular nature of empirical movement paths. Moreover, other significant components of the movement, such as motor pauses, are disregarded. To overcome these drawbacks, we present a novel approach (EMOT) to analyze computer-mouse trajectories that quantifies movement features in terms of entropy while modeling trajectories as composed by fast movements and motor pauses. A dedicated entropy decomposition analysis is additionally developed for the model parameters estimation. Two real case studies from categorization tasks are finally used to test and evaluate the characteristics of the new approach.

Stress affects articulatory planning in reading aloud.

Three experiments of pseudoword reading assessed whether stress assignment affects reading aloud at the level of articulation planning. In Experiment 1 (immediate reading) both stimulus length (in syllables) and stress type affected reading latency and accuracy. Italian pseudowords were named faster and more accurately when they were assigned stress on the antepenultimate rather than on the penultimate syllable. In Experiment 2 (delayed reading) reading aloud of the same stimuli was not affected by length but was still affected by stress type, with shorter latencies for pseudowords stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. Experiment 3 replicated the results of the first two experiments with new materials and with a tightly controlled procedure. These results indicate that stress assignment exerts an effect in a processing component where articulation is planned since articulation cannot start until stress is assigned. Our results also suggest that, in reading aloud, the minimal planning unit for articulation is smaller than the whole stimulus, including the first syllable up to the stressed unit.

When orthography is not enough: The effect of lexical stress in lexical decision.

Three lexical decision experiments were carried out in Italian, in order to verify if stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) had an effect on polysyllabic word recognition. Two factors were manipulated: whether the target word carried stress on the penultimate (dominant; “graNIta,” “seNIle”—slush, senile) or on the antepenultimate (non-dominant) syllable (“MISsile,” “BIbita”—missile, drink), and whether the stress neighborhood was consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or inconsistent (seNIle, BIbita) with the word’s stress pattern. In Experiment 1, words were mixed with nonwords sharing the word endings, which made words and nonwords more similar to each other. In Experiment 2, words and nonwords were presented in lists blocked for stress pattern. In Experiment 3, we used a new set of nonwords, which included endings with (stress) ambiguous neighborhoods and/or with a low number of neighbors, and which were overall less similar to words. In all three experiments, there was an advantage for words with penultimate (dominant) stress and no main effect of stress neighborhood. However, the dominant stress advantage decreased in Experiments 2 and 3. Finally, in Experiment 4, the same materials used in Experiment 1 were also used in a reading-aloud task, showing a significant consistency effect but no dominant stress advantage. The influence of stress information in Italian word recognition is discussed.

The segment-to-frame association in word reading: early effects of the interaction between segmental and suprasegmental information

In four reading aloud experiments we investigated the operations occurring at the level of the phonological buffer by manipulating stress and phoneme information. In all experiments we adopted a masked priming paradigm with three-syllable Italian word targets. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the effect of pure segmental (e.g., fe%%%% – FEcola) and pure suprasegmental (CInema – FEcola) overlap, respectively. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the joint manipulation of segmental and suprasegmental information, by using prime-target pairs that shared the first syllable and did or did not share their stress pattern (e.g., FEgato – FEcola vs. feNIce – FEcola). The results showed that both segmental and suprasegmental primes affect reading at an abstract phonological level. Moreover, the joint manipulation of stress and phonemes showed an asymmetric pattern for different stress patterns, suggesting that the phonemic and the stress systems address the articulation planning through a process that starts as soon as the relevant information about the to-be-planned unit is active.

From sound to meaning : phonology-to-semantics mapping in visual word recognition

In the present study, the role of phonological information in visual word recognition is investigated by adopting a large-scale data-driven approach that exploits a new consistency measure based on distributional semantics methods. A recent study by Marelli, Amenta, and Crepaldi (2015) showed that the consistency between an orthographic string and the meanings to which it is associated in a large corpus is a relevant predictor in lexical decision experiments. Exploiting irregular mappings between orthography and phonology in English, we were able to compute a phonology-to-semantics consistency measure that dissociates from its orthographic counterpart and tested both measures on lexical decision data taken from the British Lexicon Project (Keuleers et al., 2012). Results showed that both orthography and phonology are activated during visual word recognition. However, their contribution is crucially determined by the extent to which they are informative of the word semantics, and phonology plays a crucial role in accessing word meaning.

It takes biking to learn: Physical activity improves learning a second language.

Recent studies have shown that concurrent physical activity enhances learning a completely unfamiliar L2 vocabulary as compared to learning it in a static condition. In this paper we report a study whose aim is twofold: to test for possible positive effects of physical activity when L2 learning has already reached some level of proficiency, and to test whether the assumed better performance when engaged in physical activity is limited to the linguistic level probed at training (i.e. L2 vocabulary tested by means of a Word-Picture Verification task), or whether it extends also to the sentence level (which was tested by means of a Sentence Semantic Judgment Task). The results show that Chinese speakers with basic knowledge of English benefited from physical activity while learning a set of new words. Furthermore, their better performance emerged also at the sentential level, as shown by their performance in a Semantic Judgment task. Finally, an interesting temporal asymmetry between the lexical and the sentential level emerges, with the difference between the experimental and control group emerging from the 1st testing session at the lexical level but after several weeks at the sentential level.