Processing Swedish Word Accents - evidence from response and reaction times

Sammanfattning: The effects of Central Swedish word accents on morphological and semantic processing were investigated. It was found that Accent 2-inducing suffixes preceded by an Accent 1 tone were more difficult to process compared to Accent 1-inducing suffixes preceded by Accent 2. This effect was relatively task-independent, i.e. found both when participants judged the tense or number of the word and when they simply listened to the word and pushed a button at word offset. The effect was absent when de-lexicalised stimuli that lacked lexical information were presented. This suggests that there is a stronger association in the mental lexicon between suffixes and Accent 2 compared to Accent 1. Also, correct Accent 2 words took longer to process compared to correct Accent 1 words. It was suggested that this is due to the extra lexical information that is activated upon hearing the Accent 2 tone. When e.g. a suffix is heard, the competing lexical candidates need to be de-activated. In addition, correlation analyses showed that shorter auditory stimuli elicit longer response and reaction times. This will have important implications for improving future response/reaction time experiments.