The psychological reality of underlying forms and rules for stress

The stress contours of most English words can be generated from underlying forms which are closely related to their traditional orthographic representations. If such underlying forms are psychologically real, then native speakers should generally agree in assigning stress to unknown written words. Since some of the stress rules for English are based in part on learned Latinate vocabulary, the test words were of Latin, Greek, and Germanic origin to test for differences in performance relative to the source of the word. The results show a high degree of consistency in stress assignment but no significant differences in performance on words of different origin.