Bi-dialectal homophone effects in Kansai Japanese lexical decision tasks

Many Japanese varieties, including Tokyo Japanese, have lexical pitch accent patterns that can result in homophones that vary across dialects, such as ame HL 'rain (Tokyo)' and ame LH 'candy (Tokyo), rain (Kansai)'. Experimental research on lexical pitch accent in Japanese has been limited, however, to Tokyo Japanese and accentless varieties (Utsugi, Koizumi & Mazuka, 2011). This study explores homophone effects of minimal accent pairs for speakers of Kansai Japanese, a dialect that, unlike Tokyo Japanese, has base tone melodies, HL or LHL (Haraguchi, 1977), in addition to lexical pitch accent. Unlike previous studies on processing effects of Japanese homophones (Cutler & Otake, 1999; Minematsu & Hirose, 1995) that focus on visual recognition in Tokyo Japanese (Hino, Kusunose, Lupker & Jared, 2013; Sekiguchi, 2006), the current experiment measures reaction times to auditory stimuli in a lexical decision task comparing Tokyo Japanese with Kansai Japanese, whose speakers are typically bi-dialectal speakers of Tokyo Japanese as well. Results of the study will shed light on the issue of how pitch accent affects spoken word recognition in two different pitch accent varieties of Japanese.