Vance (1979)’s Study

There is an important study by Vance (1979) that provides evidence bearing on the psychological status o f rdk and some o f the proposed conditions on rdk. Vance carried out a set o f binary-choice acceptability tests involving nonsense-words designed to test (1) the inhibition effect o f rdk in dvandva (coordinate) compound structure, (2) the correlation between type frequency in existing examples and subjects’ rdk production rate, (3) psychological reality o f LL, and (4) the rdk-inducing effects o f nasals and long vowels in the first constituents. The subjects were 14 linguistically-naïve, native

Chapter 5 - Psycholinguistic Issues

speakers o f Tokyo Yamanote dialects, aged between 22 and 40. A ll the compound stimuli are presented orthographically, and the task is to choose one o f the two pronunciations, either with or without rdk.

The first test is intended as a gross measure o f the psychological reality o f the rdk inhibiting effect ascribed to dvandva structure. Each stimulus consists o f two ‘real’ words in which the second element almost always undergoes rdk. The results show that dvandva structure is not a psychologically real inhibitor o f rdk for some speakers: 3 subjects (o f 14) chose pronunciations with rdk in every case, 2 without rdk in every case, and most o f the others chose some with rdk.

The study further investigates the extent to which the behavior o f real second elements in novel combinations can be predicted from their behavior in existing compounds. Each stimulus contains a nonsense first element and real second element. The nonsense items are presented to the subjects as defunct Y words for their phonotactic characteristics, and are explicitly identified as such in the written instructions. The results are as follows:

(1) the number o f rdk responses correlates fairly well with the percentage o f dictionary examples with rdk. The influence o f existing examples with a given 2^^ element presumably depends to a large extent on how salient they are, or even more on how frequently they are used especially with rdk pronunciation.

(2) ^fiolation o f LL is observed: 88% o f the violations on the test items involve the 2"^ element hasigo “ladder, stairs” which shows rdk in all dictionary examples. Violations on the items with other 2“** elements show the percentage o f 2.5% o f the opportunities (mean 2.8).

Chapter 5 - Psycholinguistic Issues

speakers may be less inclined to choose a form with rdk when a element ends in a mora with a voiced obstruent; *tado + [real\ (mean 57.3) and *hoga + [real] (mean

66

.

),

The final test combines real first elements with nonsense second elements. It aims to test the subjects’ preference for rdk in nonsense words. Included are some items for testing the rdk inhibiting effect o f ‘verb-verb’ compounds and the rdk inducing effects o f the first elements ending in a nasal and long vowel, based on the claim that rdk is most likely after nasals and next most likely after long vowels (Sakurai 1966; Okumura

1980). The results are as follows:

(1) LL apparently does not exist as a categorical constraint on rdk for most o f the subjects. However, it indicates that a voiced obstruent in the 2“** element o f a compound inhibits rdk to some significant extent. The mean percentage across subjects o f rdk responses to items with no voiced obstruents in the 2"*^ element is 64%. A voiced obstruent in the 2"** or 3^** mora o f the 2"^ element significantly reduces the likelihood o f rdk responses: in the 2"** mora is 31%; the 3"* mora: 34%; the 4* mora: 47%.

(2) There are no significant rdk-inducing effects o f the first elements ending in nasals and long vowels.

(3) As for the psychological reality o f rdk inhibition in verb-verb compound, the Wilcoxon test indicates that the difference between the means (i.e., 45.4 and 43.7) is not significant at the .05 level.

Vance argues that a word’s pattern o f behavior as a 2“** element in existing compounds has a greater influence on responses. LL is clearly not psychologically real for 11 (o f 14) subjects, and there are 3 marginal cases. With one exception, a voiced obstruent in the 2"^ element o f a compound does inhibit rdk to a statistically significant

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extent even for those subjects who clearly do not observe the constraint categorically. The wide individual variation in the psychological status o f LL among representatives o f a largely homogeneous speech community is the most important.

In the following sections, we will look at one influential theory that explicitly acknowledges the dual architecture o f our language faculty. The implication o f the theory for the analysis o f rdk, as has been for other controversial phonological and morphological processes (e.g. Taiwanese Tone Sandhi, Hausa Shortening, English past tense irregular verbs), is that the dichotomy o f grammar and the lexicon - rules o f grammar and rules, in the lexicon — has a psychological and neurolinguistic motivation, and provides a better understanding o f such problematic processes in a psychological perspective.