On the Role of Sentence Stress in Sentence Processing

Words bearing high stress appear to be easier to process during sentence comprehension. Since sentence stress typically falls on content words this suggests that comprehension is organized according to a form class bias: process stressed items as content words. The present study measured reaction-time (RT) to word-initial phoneme targets on content and function words in sentence contexts. Half of the words of each type were stressed, half were not. In addition, a variable of "normality" of stress pattern was manipulated. It was found that RTs were shorter for stressed items independent of their syntactic function. No effect for content v. function words or normal v. non-normal stress pattern was observed. Results were interpreted within the framework of a predictive model utilizing the concept of semantic focus.