Article published In: Orthographic Databases and Lexicons
Edited by Lynne Cahill and Terry Joyce
[Written Language & Literacy 20:1] 2017
► pp. 80–103
STRESYL
An Italian Stress-in-Syllables database for reading research
Published online: 19 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.20.1.05sul
https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.20.1.05sul
Abstract
During the last few decades, empirical research on reading has shown increasing interest in syllable units. More recently, stress assignment has become a particular focus of interest. The relation between syllables and stress, however, has yet to be investigated for Italian. In this paper, we describe a new database, STRESYL, that can help researchers to investigate the relation between syllables and stress in Italian. STRESYL offers type and token measures relating stress information to syllable units, both in terms of syllable forms and syllabic structures.
Keywords: syllable, syllabic structure, stress, database, Italian orthography
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1The role of syllables in reading
- 1.2The marginalized relation between syllables and stress
- 2.STRESYL
- 2.1The database
- 2.2Type and token measures
- 3.Statistics
- 3.1Descriptive analyses
- Syllable forms
- Syllabic CV-structure
- 3.2Correlation analyses
- Syllable forms
- Syllabic CV-structure
- 3.1Descriptive analyses
- 4.Summary and future directions
- Notes
References
References (51)
Balota, David A., Melvin J. Yap, Keith A. Hutchison, Michael J. Cortese, Brett Kessler, Bjorn Loftis, James H. Neely, Douglas L. Nelson, Greg B. Simpson, & Rebecca Treiman. (2007). The English lexicon project. Behavior Research Methods 391: 445–459.
Bellocchi, Stephanie, Paola Bonifacci & Cristina Burani. (2016). Lexicality, frequency and stress assignment effects in bilingual children reading Italian as a second language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 191: 89–105.
Berent, Iris & Michal Marom. (2005). Skeletal structure of printed words: Evidence from the Stroop task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 311: 328–338.
Bertinetto, Pier Marco, Cristina Burani, Alessandro Laudanna, Lucia Marconi, Daniela Ratti, Claudia Rolando & Anna M. Thornton. (2005). Corpus e Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano scritto (CoLFIS) [CoLFIS. Corpus and frequency lexicon of written Italian]. Retrieved from [URL]
Blevins, Juliette. (1995). The syllable in phonological theory. In John A. Goldsmith (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory, 206–244. Oxford: Blackwell.
Burani, Cristina & Lisa S. Arduino. (2004). Stress regularity or consistency? Reading aloud Italian polysyllables with different stress patterns. Brain and Language 901: 318–325.
Burani, Cristina, Laura Barca & Andrew W. Ellis. (2006). Orthographic complexity and word naming in Italian: Some words are more transparent than others. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 131: 346–352.
Burani, Cristina & Rosaria Cafiero. (1991). The role of sub-syllabic structure in lexical access to printed words. Psychological Research 531: 42–52.
Burani, Cristina, Despina Paizi & Simone Sulpizio. (2014). Stress assignment in reading Italian: Friendship outweighs dominance. Memory & Cognition 421: 662–675.
Carreiras, Manuel, Carlos J. Alvarez & Manuel De Vega. (1993). Syllable frequency and visual word recognition in Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language 321: 766–780.
Carreiras, Manuel, Andrea Mechelli & Cathy J. Price. (2006). Effect of word and syllable frequency on activation during lexical decision and reading aloud. Human brain mapping 271: 963–972.
Chetail, Fabienne, Cécile Colin & Alain Content. (2012). Electrophysiological markers of syllable frequency during written word recognition in French. Neuropsychologia 501: 3429–3439.
Chetail, Fabienne, Michele Scaltritti & Alain Content. (2014). Effect of the consonant – vowel structure of written words in Italian. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 671: 833–842.
Cholin, Joana, Gary S. Dell & Willem JM Levelt. (2011). Planning and articulation in incremental word production: Syllable-frequency effects in English. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 371: 109–122.
Clashen, Harald. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: A multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 221: 991–1060.
Colombo, Lucia. (1992). Lexical stress effect and its interaction with frequency in word pronunciation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 181: 987–1003.
Colombo, Lucia & Simone Sulpizio. (2015). When orthography is not enough: The effect of lexical stress in lexical decision. Memory & Cognition 431: 811–824.
Conrad, Markus, Manuel Carreiras & Arthur M. Jacobs. (2008). Contrasting effects of token and type syllable frequency in lexical decision. Language and Cognitive Processes 231: 296–326.
Conrad, Markus, Jonathan Grainger & Arthur M. Jacobs. (2007). Phonology as the source of syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition: Evidence from French. Memory & Cognition 351: 974–983.
Conrad, Markus & Arthur M. Jacobs. (2004). Replicating syllable frequency effects in Spanish in German: One more challenge to computational models of visual word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes 191: 369–390.
Conrad, Markus, Sascha Tamm, Manuel Carreiras & Arthur M. Jacobs. (2010). Simulating syllable frequency effects within an interactive activation framework. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 221: 861–893.
Cutler, Anne. (2005). Lexical Stress. In David B. Pisoni & Robert E. Remez (eds.), The handbook of speech perception, 264–289. Oxford: Blackwell.
Davis, Colin J. & Manuel Perea. (2005). BuscaPalabras: A program for deriving orthographic and phonological neighborhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish. Behavior Research Methods 371: 665–671.
De Coster, Isabelle, Nathalie Baidak, Akvile Motiejunaite & Sogol Noorani. (2011). Teaching Reading in Europe: Contexts, Policies and Practices. Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency, European Commission. Available from EU Bookshop.
del Prado, Martı́n, Fermı́n Moscoso, Mirjam Ernestus & R. Harald Baayen. (2004). Do type and token effects reflect different mechanisms? Connectionist modeling of Dutch past-tense formation and final devoicing. Brain and language 901: 287–298.
D’Imperio, Mariapaola & Sam Rosenthall. (1999). Phonetics and phonology of main stress in Italian. Phonology 161: 1–28.
Ferrand, Ludovic & Boris New. (2003). Syllabic length effects in visual word recognition and naming. Acta Psychologica 1131: 167–183.
Goldsmith, John. (2011). The syllable. In John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan C. L. Yu (eds.), The handbook of phonological theory, 164–196. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goslin, Jeremy, Claudia Galluzzi & Cristina Romani. (2014). PhonItalia: a phonological lexicon for Italian. Behavior research methods 461: 872–886. Retrieved from [URL]
Hayes, Bruce. (1995). Metrical stress theory: Principles and case studies. University of Chicago Press.
Jouravlev, Olessia & Stephen J. Lupker. (2014). Stress consistency and stress regularity effects in Russian. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 291: 605–619.
Laganaro, Marina & F.-Xavier Alario. (2006). On the locus of the syllable frequency effect in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language 551: 178–196.
Mahé, Gwendoline, Anne Bonnefond & Nadège Doignon-Camus. (2014). The time course of the syllable frequency effect in visual word recognition: Evidence for both facilitatory and inhibitory effects in French. Reading and Writing 271: 171–187.
Marom, Michal & Iris Berent. (2010). “Phonological constraints on the assembly of skeletal structure in reading. Journal of psycholinguistic research 391: 67–88.
Perret, Cyril, Laurence Schneider, Géraldine Dayer & Marina Laganaro. (2014). Convergences and divergences between neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic data in the study of phonological and phonetic encoding: A parallel investigation of syllable frequency effects in brain-damaged and healthy speakers. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 291: 714–727.
Perry, Conrad, Johannes C. Ziegler & Marco Zorzi. (2010). Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process (CDP++) model. Cognitive Psychology 611: 106–151.
. (2014). CDP++.Italian: Modelling sublexical and supralexical inconsistency in a shallow orthography. PloS one 91: e94291.
Primativo, Silvia, Pasquale Rinaldi, Shaunna O’Brien, Despina Paizi, Lisa S. Arduino & Cristina Burani. (2013). Bilingual vocabulary size and lexical reading in Italian. Acta Psychologica 1441: 554–562.
Ševa, Nava, Padraic Monaghan & Joanne Arciuli. (2009). Stressing what is important: Orthographic cues and lexical stress assignment. Journal of Neurolinguistics 221: 237–249.
Spinelli, Giacomo, Simone Sulpizio & Cristina Burani. (2016). Q2Stress: A database for multiple cues to stress assignment in Italian. Behavior Research Methods, 1–14. Advanced online publication.
Stella, Vitantonio & Remo Job. (2001). The PD/DPSS syllables. A database on syllable frequency in written Italian. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 281: 633–639. Retrieved from [URL]
Sulpizio, Simone, Lisa S. Arduino, Despina Paizi & Cristina Burani. (2013). Stress assignment in reading Italian polysyllabic pseudowords. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 391: 51–68.
Sulpizio, Simone & Lucia Colombo. (2013). Lexical stress, frequency, and stress neighbourhood effects in the early stages of Italian reading development. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 661: 2073–2084.
Sulpizio, Simone & Remo Job. (2010). Effect of syllable frequency in speech production and visual word recognition: evidence from Italian. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 371: 707–718.
. (2013). Syllable frequency and stress priming interact in reading Italian aloud. In Markus Knauff, Michael Pauen, Natalie Sebanz & Ipke Wachsmuth (eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1402–1407. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Sulpizio, Simone & James M. McQueen. (2012). Italians use abstract knowledge about lexical stress during spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language 661: 177–193.
Sulpizio, Simone, Giacomo Spinelli & Cristina Burani. (2015). Stress affects articulation planning in reading aloud. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 411: 453–461.
Thornton, Anna M., Claudio Iacobini & Cristina Burani. (1997). BDVBD. Una base di dati sul vocabolario di base della lingua italiana [BDVDB: A database for the Italian basic dictionary]. Roma: Bulzoni.
Vio, Claudio & Maria L. Tretti. (2008). Il trattamento del disturbo della lettura. Evidenze dell’efficacia di un intervento di automatizzazione della decodifica attraverso il software abilitativo Occhio alla lettera [Treating dyslexia: Evidence regarding the effectiveness of a decoding automatization treatment using Occhio alla lettera (‘Watch the letter’) software]. Dislessia 121: 289–300.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Share, David L.
Spinelli, Giacomo, Sonia Trettenero, Stephen J. Lupker & Lucia Colombo
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
