In the process of compound truncation for loanwords in Japanese, the most common form is to take the first two moras of each component word. However, when the second mora of the first component contains a long sound, it may be shortened. It has been argued that two principles operate in the formation of shortened words: energy conservation and recoverability. Word truncation is the process of attempting to shorten a word, but if the word is shortened too much, the original word cannot be recovered. This idea leads to the hypothesis that when recoverability is highly demanded, people would attempt to shorten a long sound while preserving the information in the next mora. We conducted an experiment using nonce words and analyzed a database of real words, which revealed that shortening is rather reduced under conditions where recoverability is highly demanded. Shortening tended to be more frequent for meaningful words that should be recoverable compared to nonwords. Additionally, shortening was observed in cases where shortened forms resulted in more phonologically competing items. We reanalyzed the results from the perspective that phonologically similar words are more accessible as they gain more activation in the mental lexicon. We found that words with more phonological neighbors were more likely to be shortened when they were longer than average. This pattern was also supported by an experiment with nonce words. The results were interpreted in the view of preference for accessibility over recoverability in the process of compound word truncation.
