Asymmetrical roles of segment and pitch accent in Japanese spoken word recognition.

This study examines the roles of segment and pitch accent in Japanese spoken word recognition. In a lexical decision task, it replicates the finding of Cutler and Otake [(1999) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 105(3), 1877-1888] that pitch accent restricts word activation with a more comprehensive, rigorous experimental design. Furthermore, results uncover an asymmetrical role of segment and pitch accent in word recognition in Japanese: words primed by a pitch accent-matching prime are recognized more slowly and less accurately than words primed by a segment-matching prime.