Pitch accent in spoken-word recognition in Japanese

Three experiments addressed the question of whether pitch-accent informatio n may be exploited in the process of recognizing spoken words in Tokyo Japa nese. In a two-choice classification task, listeners judged from which of t wo words, differing in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been ext racted (e.g., ka from baka HL or gaka LH); most judgments were correct, and listeners' decisions were correlated with the fundamental frequency charac teristics of the syllables. In a gating experiment, listeners heard initial fragments of words and guessed what the words were; their guesses overwhel mingly had the same initial accent structure as the gated word even when on ly the beginning CV of the stimulus (e.g., na- from nagasa HLL or nagashi L HH) was presented. In addition, listeners were more confident in guesses wi th the same initial accent structure as the stimulus than in guesses with d ifferent accent. In a lexical decision experiment, responses to spoken word s (e.g., ame HL) were speeded by previous presentation of the same word (e. g., ame HL) but not by previous presentation of a word differing only in ac cent (e.g., ame LH). Together these findings provide strong evidence that a ccentual information constrains the activation and selection of candidates for spoken-word recognition. (C) 1999 Acoustical Society of America. [S0001 -4966(99)03003-9].