Processing morphologically conditioned word accents

The present response time study investigated the influence Central Swedish word accents have on the interpretation of inflectional morphology. Effects of stem tone match/mismatch on the interpretation of Swedish present and past tense suffixes were tested. Both Accent 1 and Accent 2 were found to influence listeners’ response times related to decisions on verb tense. It thus seems that both word accents can facilitate online interpretation of words. Previous studies where tasks have not required suffix interpretation have only found an effect of Accent 1 patterns on Accent 2-associated suffixes. Accent 2 suffixes further yielded generally greater response times than Accent 1-associated suffixes. Different possible explanations for this are discussed.