Several writers have suggested that lexically stressed syllables form potential ‘islands of reliability’ in continuous speech. This paper describes experiments which examined the processing of words with stressed and unstressed initial syllables in both read and spontaneous speech. In the first experiment, which focussed on read materials, trisyllabic nouns were presented, gated, in three contextually-defined conditions. Analysis of the responses made by subjects hearing only the initial syllable of the stimuli revealed that stressed initial syllables were markedly more intelligible than their unstressed counterparts, but when hearers were presented with the full stimulus, there were no reliable intelligibility differences. The second and third experiments examined the hypothesis that the intelligibility difference between stressed and unstressed syllables would be greater in spontaneous than in read speech. In Experiment 2, a large number of polysyllabic content words, excised from the speech of 6 speakers, were gated and presented without supporting context. Significant effects were found for version (Read vs. Spontaneous) and stress (Initially Stressed vs. Initially Unstressed) on several dependent variables, but version and stress failed to interact in the predicted manner. Such an interaction was observed, however, in Experiment 3, in which a subset of the materials from Experiment 2 was presented in context. It is proposed that this interaction stemmed from a reduced availability of contextual cues in spontaneous speech, due to the relatively poor intelligibility of the preceding sentence fragment. This explanation found support in Experiment 4. The results are discussed with respect to recent, activation-based theories of word recognition.
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