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Japanese sequential voicing (rendaku) is a process of voicing the initial obstruent of the second member of a compound word in Japanese (e.g. hon 'book'+tana 'shelf'→hon-dana). We conducted an event-related potential measurement experiment to investigate whether rendaku is a regular process of rule application or an analogical process based on lexical memory. When rendaku was applied wrongly to words lexically specified to resist rendaku, a left anterior negativity component, followed by a P600 was observed, whereas applying rendaku against a phonological constraint known as Lyman's law elicited a P600 component alone. Failure of rendaku application where it should apply yielded an N400. These results suggest that rendaku is a process involving rule application.

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This paper discusses the nature of restrictions imposed by derivational affixes on the bases in word formation. While some derivational affixes select the base of a particular syntactic category, there are affixes whose restrictions on the base are semantic in nature. Two sets of nominalization affixes in Japanese (-sa and -mi; -kata and -buri) display different and disjoint semantic and syntactic selectional properties, which operate independently from each other, as well as interact to block certain derived nominal forms. The way different types of base selection by these affixes work and interact with each other is best accounted for by a modular approach to word formation, as advocated by the Autolexical Syntax model (Sadock 1991).