The use of lexical prosody for lexical access of the Japanese language

It has been suggested that English listeners do not use lexical prosody for lexical access in word recognition. The present study was designed to examine whether this argument could be generalized to the Japanese language. Two experiments using a cross-modal priming task were conducted. The participants made a lexical decision regarding a visual target following an auditory prime that was either the prosodically congruent or incongruent homophone of the target. In experiment 1, the primes were presented as complete words, and in experiment 2, they were presented as word fragments. In both experiments, the priming effects were observed only in the congruent condition. These results suggest that the prime activated only the representations of prosodically congruent words. We therefore concluded that Japanese listeners use lexical prosody for lexical access of their language and that the role of lexical prosody is determined language-specifically.