The Effect of the Lexical Stress Pattern on Lexical Access of Persian Native Speakers

4 Researches in LinguisticsThe Effect of the Lexical Stress Pattern on Lexical Access of Persian NativeSpeakersP. S. FeizabadiUniversity of TehranM. BijankhanUniversity of TehranAbstractIn speech recognition process, while listening to a word, a number of word representationsare assumed to be activated simultaneously as candidates for an incoming word, and laterthe appropriate one is selected (McQeen et al. 1994). An important issue in speechprocessing is the kind of information that constrains lexical activation. Suprasegmentalfeatures are amongst factors which can play an important role in mental lexicon activation.The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of lexical stress on mental lexiconactivation in Persian. For this purpose, 10 Persian words with two possible stress patternsand two different meanings, and from different syntactic categories were selected. Thetarget words were offered to the experiment participants in the form of three questionnaires.The results of the present study showed that: 1) stress pattern used while reading the targetwords is affected by the context in which the words are placed. 2) There is no relationbetween stress pattern used while reading the target words and the written word in front ofthem. In other words, when people want to write a word in front of the target words, they donot pay attention to the stress pattern they have used while reading the word. The reason ofthe second result could be that in Persian almost all verbs have just one stress pattern.Therefore, the participants consider the target words of this study as exceptions and do notpay attention to the stress pattern.Key Words: Lexical Stress, Mental Lexicon, Lexical Activation, Lexical Access feizabadi@alumni.ut.ac.ir mbjkhan@ut.ac.ir