Lexical stress, frequency and stress neighborhood 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 neighborhood (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 children’s reading, suggesting the simultaneous use of both lexical and sub-lexical information. Moreover, as the reading system develops and knowledge about the relative distribution of stress neighborhood increases, larger grain-size units are also exploited.