title: Asymmetric processing of lexical tonal contrast in Swedish.
abstract: Languages such as Swedish use suprasegmental information such as tone, over and above segments, to mark lexical contrast. Theories differ with respect to the abstractness and specification of tone in the mental lexicon. In a forced choice task, we tested Swedish listeners' responses to words with segmentally identical first syllables differing in tonal contours (characterized as Accents 1 and 2). We assumed Accent 1 to be lexically specified for a subset of words and hypothesized that this specification would speed up word accent identification. As was predicted, listeners were fastest in choosing the tonally correct word when the accent was lexically specified. We conclude that the processing of surface tonal contours is governed by their underlying lexical structure with tonal specification.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany. verena.felder@uni-konstanz.de
authors.forename: Verena
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Felder
authors.forename: Elisabet
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jönsson-Steiner
authors.forename: Carsten
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Eulitz
authors.forename: Aditi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lahiri
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception