Does stress matter?

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates the effect of stress change during compound processing in Modern Greek. Twenty-five native speakers were tested in a cross-modal lexical decision task and a naming task in order to test for performance differences across stress-change vs. non-stress-change compounds. No statistically significant difference was found for the lexical decision task. However, the naming task showed a significant effect of stress change in compound processing, with the production of non-stress-change compounds showing facilitation. These results indicate that stress change is reflected in compound processing in Greek and underscore the importance of considering the interplay between specific tasks and the computational role of linguistic features.