Roll, M. & Horne, M.
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University
Central Swedish word accents are realized by a low (Accent 1) or high (Accent 2) tone on the word stem. However, the word accent depends on which suffix is attached to the stem. Thus, if the stem mink- is combined with the definite singular suffix –en, the resulting word minken ‘the mink’ has Accent 1, with a low tone on the stem. If instead the plural suffix –ar is attached to the same stem, the outcome is the Accent 2 word minkar ‘minks,’ which has a high stem tone. A much-discussed topic is whether word accents are associated with whole word forms in the mental lexicon or whether they are assigned through combinatory morphophonological processes. Another question is whether both word accents are associated with specific suffix classes in the mental lexicon, or whether e.g. Accent 1 is a post-lexical default accent. We used event-related potentials to compare effects of mismatch between word accents and inflectional suffixes with mismatches between stem and suffix in terms of declension class. Declensionally incorrect suffixes yielded an increase in the N400, indicating problems in lexical retrieval, as well as a P600 effect, showing reanalysis. High tone-inducing (Accent 2) suffixes combined with a mismatching low stem tone (Accent 1) produced P600 effects, but did not increase the N400. The P600 appeared both in declensionally correct and incorrect words. Suffixes co-occurring with Accent 1 did not yield any effects in words realized with the nonmatching Accent 2, suggesting that Accent1 is a default accent, lacking association with any particular suffix. High tones on Accent 2 words also produced a P200 effect reflecting preattentive processing of the tone. The results indicate that high stem tones realizing Accent 2 activate a certain class of suffixes in online processing, whereas Accent 1 tones do not.