The articulatory in-out effect for nonsense Japanese words

Abstract

The articulatory in-out effect refers to the phenomenon where preferences for words vary depending on the direction of the movement in place of articulation. Prior studies have shown that this effect occurs in various linguistic regions particularly within Indo-European languages. However, few studies have addressed the in-out effect in Japanese speakers and issues of stimulus control remain. In this study, we created a pool of nonsense Japanese word stimuli and investigated whether the in-out effect also occurred in adult Japanese speakers, while controlling for the number of word-initial voiced obstruents. The results of two experiments showed that the in-out effect was observed in adult Japanese speakers and that the effect occurred even with controls for word-initial voiced obstruents. These findings confirm the robustness of the in-out effect, which has been mainly investigated with WEIRD samples.