Processing prosodically driven variations in lexical access

This study investigates whether prosodically driven variants constrain lexical access by focusing on the processing of prosodically licit and illicit Korean lenis plosives and nasals. Lenis plosives are aspirated phrase-initially but voiced phrase-medially; nasals undergo nasal weakening (“denasalization”) phrase-initially but not phrase-medially. Importantly, denasalized nasals share acoustic similarities with voiced lenis plosives. Seoul Korean listeners completed four cross-modal priming experiments where primes in phrase-initial sentential position were related (experimental) (e.g., /tapal/ “bundle”) or unrelated (control) (e.g., /tʃodɛ/ “invitation”) to visual targets (e.g., 다발/tapal/). The target began with a lenis plosive (Exps. 1 and 2) or nasal (Exps. 3 and 4). The experimental prime began with a prosodically licit (Exp. 1: aspirated lenis, Exp. 3: denasalized nasal) or illicit (Exp. 2: voiced lenis, Exp. 4: nasalized nasal) variant. The results showed that experimental primes with a prosodically licit variant (Exps. 1 and 3) facilitated word recognition. For prosodically illicit variants, experimental primes with a nasalized nasal (Exp. 4) facilitated word recognition but experimental primes with a voiced plosive did not (Exp. 2). The facilitation in Exp. 4 suggests that prosodically driven variants do not constrain lexical access; the lack of facilitation in Exp. 2 is attributed to lexical competition from nasal-initial words.