OCP effects on Japanese phonological processing

要旨

The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) refers to a linguistic constraint on similar or same phonological elements or features from being repeated (e.g., Fukazawa, 1999Fukazawa, , 2000;;It & Mester, 1986;Kubozono, 1999;Kubozono & ta, 1998).Kubozono and ta (1998) suggested the possibility that vowel dissimilation in Japanese may be a result of the OCP.For example, the two Japanese morphemes /nana/ meaning 'seven' and /ka/ meaning 'day' combine to form the compound word /nanoka/ meaning 'the seventh day' instead of /nanaka/, which would seem to be the likely combination.This process of vowel dissimilation occurs so as to avoid vowel repetition of /a/ in sequence within the three mora CVCVCV word structure (C referring to 'consonant' and V referring to 'vowel').Thus, it would be expected that naming visually-presented Japanese words and nonwords violating the OCP (i.e., same vowel repetition in a series of CV strings) would result in slower processing speeds and higher error rates.To test this hypothesis, two experiments were conducted.The first experiment examined OCP effects in naming real words with and without same vowel repetition.The second experiment investigated OCP effects in naming nonwords under both conditions. EXPERIMENT 1 NAMING REAL WORDS WITH SAME VOWEL REPETITIONAssuming that the OCP affects phonological processing of words with same vowel repetition, the first experiment tested the prediction that CVCVCV-structured words with same vowel repetition would take longer to be named and result in higher error rates than a counter group of CVCVCV-structured words with no such repetition.

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