In 4 naming experiments we investigated how Italian readers assign stress to pseudowords. We assessed whether participants assign stress following distributional information such as stress neighborhood (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) and whether such distributional information affects…

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of…