Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Scandinavian languages like Swedish employ tonal accent as a lexical phonological feature, where suprasegmentalinformation can be the sole factor differentiating between words. Using cross-modal semantic fragment priming we testedthe following: (a) Do monolingual speakers of Swedish use tonal accent information during lexical access? (b) Do bilingualspeakers, who grew up with one tonal (Swedish) and one non-tonal language, treat this feature the same way as monolinguals?Our results show that for monolinguals, accent mispronunciations eliminate priming effects, implying that tone is used duringlexical access. For bilinguals, by contrast, mispronunciation sensitivity depends on both the accent type and its distributionacross the linguistic input, as well as on the lexical neighbourhood.