Syllabic composition and use frequency: how do they affect stress assignment? A comparison between slow readers and fluent readers

Italian words can be stressed either on penultimate or antepenultimate syllables. In both cases, stress assignment is not predictable by rules, but requires a lexical check. Italian words with stress on the penultimate syllable are defined as regular because the proportion of these words is much larger than words with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, defined as irregular. We propose to investigate the influence (in terms of correct stress positioning) of different syllabic and stress structures during "decoding” by both slow readers and fluent readers. Forty-eight children, twenty-four slow and twenty-four fluent readers, decoded “target words” selected on the basis of frequency (hig…