Perception of suprasegmental structure in a non-native dialect

Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitchaccent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentlessvariety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spokenword recognition. In the "rst experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, di!ering in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns di!ered from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed signi"cantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect a!ects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese. ( 1999 Academic Press