The Effect of Word Accent Production on Reading Performance in Japanese Young Children

The Influence of Accent Pattern Typicality on Immediate and Delayed Nonword Repetition

“…The results for children's repetition of tri-mora words reported by Sakono et al (2011) showed the accent typicality effect because phonemic representations of words in children could be weaker than those in adults. This hypothesis might generalize across languages as it would also explain the children's data obtained for words in stress-accent languages (de Bree et al, 2006;Roy & Chiat, 2004).…”

“…In particular, the effect of accent pattern typicality might be more salient or only observed for phonotactically low frequency nonwords, because their phonemic sequences might be less strongly represented even for adults and therefore might require stronger support from another dimension of phonology-pitch accent in the case of the Japanese language (see also Ueno et al, 2014, for a similar rationale). On the other hand, if the poorer repetition of less-typical accent words observed in Sakono et al (2011) simply reflected the lower repetition performance of the atypical accent pattern itself, the conditional rate of phonemic accuracy on accent correct trials might not show any effect of the accent pattern typicality.…”

“…In Japanese trimora words, the flat pattern is the most frequent and type-1 accent is the second but the type-2 accent is infrequent (Sato, 1993). Sakono, Ito, Fukuda, and Fukuda (2011) reported an effect of pitch-accent pattern typicality on repetition of single unfamiliar tri-mora real words in children (ranged from 5; 0 to 6; 7 years old): unfamiliar words presented with the atypical type-2 accent were recalled less accurately than ones presented with flat and type-1. This result suggests that the quasiregularity of Japanese pitch-accent pattern might have an impact on phonological representations utilized in the repetition task.…”

“…Patterson et al, 2006;Sekiguchi, 2006;Ueno, Saito, Rogers, & Lambon Ralph, 2011;Ueno et al, 2014). In addition, because Sakono et al (2011) defined correct responses as those with both correct phoneme sequences and accent patterns, it is unclear whether the lower repetition performance in the type-2 accent condition arose from phonemic sequence errors or accent errors, or both. The question as to which factors have an impact on phonological representations is important for understanding word learning.…”

“…Although previous studies have not paid much attention to the influence (e.g., Sakono et al, 2011), it is important to examine the effect of phonotactic frequency on repetition of accent patterns of nonwords in order to fully understand the interaction between phonemic sequence and accent patterns. If the representational quality of phoneme sequences has an impact on accent representations, an accent pattern of a nonword with a low frequency phoneme sequence should result in lower repetition performance than nonwords with a high frequency phoneme sequence, even on the conditional rate of accent accuracy on phoneme correct trials.…”