This study uses a lexical decision task to examine left (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients' sensitiveness to stress patterns in lexical access. The latency and error rate results indicate that LHD patients and non-brain-damaged individuals are both sensitive to lexical stress in word recognition, whereas the reaction time data for the RHD group showed no significant influence of stress pattern. There is however a suubstantial individual variability in performance.