Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Hirose & Mazuka (2015 & 2017) demonstrate that Japanese speaking adults and first graders both show anticipatorycompound processing, using the language-specific compound accent rule (=CAR). That is, six- to seven-year-old childrencan exploit compound prosody to disambiguate the structure and meaning of a given compound. However, we do notknow exactly when and how children start exploiting the CAR to properly comprehend compounds. Thus, we investi-gated Japanese-speaking childrens acquisition of the CAR and their development of compound processing. We conductedlongitudinal experiments using compound comprehension tasks on 65 Japanese-speaking children aging from two- to four-years. We found that childrens compound processing strategies changed after their acquiring the CAR. Before acquiringit, children could not identify the compound head; instead they showed a language-general parsing preference for theleft-most part of a compound. Our results suggest that childrens acquisition of the language-specific CAR enables theircompound processing.