Ch Xx: Psycholinguistic Studies of Rendaku * 1 Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of experimental studies of rendaku. The general spirit behind these studies is to test whether rendaku—and other factors that affect the applicability of rendaku— are psychologically real. Experiments using nonce words, or those that ask the participants to create new compounds, address the question of whether patterns of rendaku are internalized in native speakers’ mind; i.e. grammaticalized. This spirit is clearly articulated in Vance (1979), which also offers the very first experimental study of rendaku. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the experiments that address the question of whether rendaku is a grammatical process or a lexicalized pattern. Section 3 summarizes experiments on various specific aspects of rendaku. Section 4 discusses experimental approaches to Lyman’s Law, as it relates to rendaku and beyond. Section 5 presents work on the acquisition of rendaku. The final section discusses remaining issues.