Presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.
Prague, Czech Republic, 12–14 July 2007

Reading aloud entails production of stress patterns and not only segment sequences. In Greek, stress is always marked with a special diacritic. This information is not always fully utilized, as strong lexical influences on stress assignment have been found in children and adults. Here we investigate the development of decoding the stress diacritic in 90 children from Grades 2, 3, and 4, who read 108 pseudowords, half of them resembling the words they were derived from, presented with or without a diacritic. Results showed strong and increasing lexical effects through the grades. The effect of the diacritic grew more rapidly, approaching but not reaching the lexical effect at higher grades. We conclude that decoding of the diacritic is not the preferred option for developing readers, only becoming efficiently utilized at advanced reading stages, despite constant availability and reliability. We discuss possible reasons in terms of processing cost versus information gained.