34 Does stress matter? A study of stress related priming effects on Greek compounds Athanasios Tsiamas Eva Kehayia McGill University McGill University, CRIR Abstract Single word compounds in Modern Greek (henceforth Greek) exhibit two main stress patterns; a) the compound preserves the stress of the second constituent and b) the compound receives stress on the antepenultimate syllable. Previous studies on compound processing have argued that compounds are represented in two ways, as whole units or decomposed. While other compound properties like headedness, constituency, and θ-role saturation have been examined both from a theoretical linguistic and a psycholinguistic standpoint, the phonological properties of compound words and in particular, stress assignment, have not yet been examined from a psycholinguistic perspective. This project focuses on the effect of stress on naming (timed reading) and word recognition of Greek compounds. Twenty native speakers participated in two experiments (cross-modal lexical decision and primed naming), specifically selected to investigate whether stress activates phonological cues speakers rely upon during processing. It is hypothesized that if compound processing involves the activation of its constituents, we would expect a differential performance for compounds with no stress change as compared to those with stress change, mainly due to the activation of the different compound features during lexical access. The experimental results confirm this hypothesis, especially for the naming task, where, due to its nature, phonological effects were expected to mediate processing. 1 Compounding in Greek. An overview Greek compounds have been analyzed as complex word constructs 1 that consist of more than one root: (1) domatosaláta < domat- -o- salata- „tomato salad‟ „tomato‟ -CI- „salad‟ In most cases, there is a vowel, -o-, between the two constituents. Following Ralli (2007), we consider this vowel to be a linking element that acts as a 1 This study focuses on instances of single -word compounds i.e., formations that exhibit a single main stress. The language also has “multi-word compounds” that resemble regular NPs like psixrós pólemos „cold war‟, or zóni asfalías „safety belt‟. The properties of these formations fall beyond the scope of this paper and will not be addressed.