The role of pitch pattern in Japanese 24-month-olds’ word recognition

Abstract Previous research has demonstrated that Chinese-learning children use lexical pitch pattern to disambiguate words throughout development but English-learning children do not. To determine which linguistic properties lead children to retain such sensitivity, we focused on Japanese, a pitch accent language in which pitch pattern accompanies every word but plays a far weaker role in word discrimination than in Chinese. We observed Japanese-learning 24-month-olds’ responses to a familiar word with an incorrect pitch pattern in a picture fixation task. The results show that children could identify the referent familiar object, although they needed more time to do so than when the word was presented with the correct pitch pattern. These results suggest that young Japanese children do not treat pitch pattern as a determinant of word meanings, although they can easily detect changes in pitch patterns. The findings are discussed in terms of the language properties that affect children’s sensitivity to lexical pitch information.