Orthographic cues to lexical stress: effects on naming and lexical decision.

Words whose spellings represent regular phonemic patterns, such as mint, show advantages in naming and lexical decision tasks over words, such as pint, that have exceptional relations between orthographic and phonemic patterns. We have extended such phenomena to the domain of lexical stress, by showing that disyllabic words whose spellings are consistent with their stress are easier to process than words whose spellings 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 tasks (Experiments 2 and 3). These results indicate that literate speakers have learned orthographic correlates to lexical stress in English. In addition, the similarities between results in the phonemic and prosodic domains indicate that models of reading developed for the former could be extended to the latter area.