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

In speech recognition process, while listening to a word, a number of word representations are assumed to be activated simultaneously as candidates for an incoming word, and later the appropriate one is selected (McQeen et al. 1994). An important issue in speech processing is the kind of information that constrains lexical activation. Suprasegmental features 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 lexicon activation in Persian. For this purpose, 10 Persian words with two possible stress patterns and two different meanings, and from different syntactic categories were selected. The target 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 target words is affected by the context in which the words are placed. 2) There is no relation between stress pattern used while reading the target words and the written word in front of them. In other words, when people want to write a word in front of the target words, they do not pay attention to the stress pattern they have used while reading the word. The reason of the 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 not pay attention to the stress pattern.