Alexeeva, S.
St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia
Previous studies revealed that stress patterns of words could guide eye movements during reading. Particularly, words with two stressed syllables took longer time and received more fixations than one-stressed syllables and readers favor syntactic analysis that leads to prosodic representation in which stressed and unstressed syllables alternate rhythmically. But it remains unknown whether stress position plays any role in eye-movement behavior. Funded by RFH, N14-04-00586
In Russian stress has no fixed position and can occur at any syllable or morphological part of the word. We tested the effect of stress position on the first (ILP) and the second landing positions of 305 polysyllabic words extracted from a corpus of 6 Russian texts, read by 18 adults. Linear mixed modeling gave us no evidence that stress position of a word could act as a magnet to saccade targeting whether subjects fixated the word once or refixated it. We found a marginally significant decrease in first fixation duration (17 ms) if the ILP was near the stress location, the effect disappeared in gaze duration. As we could replicate the main effects of length, frequency and launch site reliably we tend to think that stress position doesn't take part in early stages of eye-movement control in reading .