ISCA Archive Interspeech 2010
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2010

Effects of accent typicality and phonotactic frequency on nonword immediate serial recall performance in Japanese

Yuuki Tanida, Taiji Ueno, Satoru Saito, Matthew A. Lambon Ralph

In a nonword serial recall experiment we found following results: (1) Phonotactically high frequent nonwords were recalled better than low ones in terms of phoneme accuracy; (2) but this phonotactic frequency effect was not observed in accent accuracy. (3) Accent typicality did not have an expected effect on phoneme recall accuracy; (4) but it had an effect on accent accuracy. These results suggest that both long-term knowledge about phoneme sequences and accent patterns have strong influences on verbal short-term memory performance, but those influences might be limited to each particular domain.