Presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Boston, MA, 25–27 June 2009

Purpose: In Greek, morphological suffixes are thought to constrain stress position. We investigated whether readers use this knowledge in addition to other stress assignment information such as the stress diacritic and the lexicon. Method: We constructed pseudowords with derivational morphological suffixes heavily biased towards a specific stress pattern, as determined by corpus analyses. These stimuli were matched to words with the same suffixes (and stress pattern) and to words ending in the same letter sequences stressed on a different syllable. Additional pseudowords and words without derivational suffixes completed the stimulus lists. The 276 stimuli were presented to 57 adult participants without a diacritic or with a diacritic on a syllable consistent or inconsistent with the suffix bias. Results: There was no significant effect of the suffix on word stress assignment. Words were stressed most often according to the diacritic, when present, or by lexical retrieval. Pseudowords were stressed most often according to the diacritic, when present. In contrast to words, readers used the derivational suffixes as cues to stress position to read the pseudowords. The effect of the suffix was larger for fully consistent stress neighborhoods and strongest in the absence of a stress diacritic. A default penultimate stress pattern was applied to pseudowords in the absence of other information. Conclusions: Stress-biasing derivational suffixes are effective sources of stress assignment only in the absence of competing information. Because this effect is limited by stress neighborhood consistency, it might be based on lexical activation and not a true morphological effect.