The role of stress in silent reading

Abstract

A small parallel Croatian-English corpus was analyzed in order to study the role of implicit prosody in silent reading. Croatian and English are well suited for this purpose with English having a stress-timed prosody and Croatian being more of a syllable-timed language. This typological difference served as an experimental control in a natural reading study. The results presented in this preliminary paper indeed point to greater attention the readers placed onto the stressed syllables, as was reflected in the two analyzed eye-tracking measures, the dwell time and the fixations count.

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