The role of stress perception in the assignment of written accent in Spanish

Abstract

The aim of this investigation is to examine whether the adults' difficulty in placing the written accent in Spanish words is related to their ability in perceiving stress. The following variables were also taken into account in this study: the participant's education level (academic and non-academic), the stimulus lexical status (words and non-words), accentual pattern (proparoxytone, paroxytone and oxytone words) and length (2, 3 and 4 syllables). Participants performed a stress identification task and a word spelling task. Besides the effects of lexical status, education level and accentual pattern, results show an effect of the stress perception in the assignment of the written accent: stimuli with a correctly identified stress were more likely to be correctly written (i.e. with or without written accent) than the incorrectly perceived stimuli. This finding reinforces the idea that there is a relationship between prosodic and written skills.