Pitch Accent Constrains Lexical Activation in Japanese Spoken Word Recognition: A semantic priming study

Abstract

The present study investigated whether Japanese listeners utilize pitch accent for lexical activation using two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. Segmentally identical but suprasegmentally different words were presented as auditory primes, followed by visual targets that were semantically congruent or incongruent with the primes. Participants made lexical decision on visual targets while listening to auditory primes. In Experiment 1, targets were presented at the offset of the primes. In Experiment 2, targets were presented in the middle of the primes. Based on the reaction time, a semantic priming effect was observed in the semantically congruent condition (e.g., jidoo HLL “children”–gakkoo “school” and jidoo LHH “automatic”–kikai “machine”) but not in the incongruent condition (e.g., jidoo HLL “children”–kikai “machine” and jidoo LHH “automatic”–gakkoo “school”) in both experiments. The results demonstrated that the auditory primes activate only words whose pitch accent was consistent with the auditory input in the listener’s mental lexicon, providing further evidence that suprasegmental information constrains lexical activation in Japanese spoken word recognition.言語学departmental bulletin pape