Italians use abstract knowledge about lexical stress during spoken-word recognition

► Eye-tracking examined recognition of known and newly-learnt Italian words. ► Italians use distributional knowledge about stress when recognizing these words. ► Italians use acoustic cues only to antepenultimate stress during word recognition. ► Full-cue antepenultimate words recognized better than learnt reduced-cue versions. ► suprasegmental (stress) knowledge is stored in the mental lexicon.