Retrieving L2 word stress from orthography: Evidence from word naming and cross-modal priming

Abstract

In this paper we investigated how L1 word stress affects L2 word naming for cognates and non-cognates in two lexical stress languages, Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1) and American English (AE, L2). In Experiment 1, BP-AE bilinguals named a mixed list of disyllabic moderate frequency words in L1 (Portuguese) and L2 (English). In Experiment 2, Portuguese-English bilinguals named English (L2) disyllabic target words presented simultaneously with auditory Portuguese (L1) disyllabic primes. It is concluded that word stress has a task-dependent role to play in bilingual word naming and must be incorporated in bilingual models of lexical production and lexical perception and reading aloud models.

Keywords

• psycholinguistics
• phonetics
• bilingualism
• lexical representation
• word stress