Chapter 11. From Diacritics to the Mental Lexicon

This chapter presents recent work on stress assignment in reading Greek, aiming to help understand the cognitive processes of reading and the representation of words in the mental lexicon. Word spelling and pseudoword reading studies spanning a wide range from early grades through adulthood have suggested a developmentally limited role for the processing of the obligatory stress diacritic. Children with reading difficulties are especially impaired in explicit stress assignment tasks involving pseudowords. Considered alongside stress priming experiments, these studies suggest that stress information is primarily derived from the lexicon and that it is associated with specific words rather than represented generically in the form of abstract templates. Further research is needed to elucidate stress representations and stress assignment processes.