Predicting Lexical Pitch-Accent Change From Properties of Verbal Working Memory: Evidence From a Family Record of the Keihan Dialect of Japanese

Research using linguistic databases has hypothesized that lexical form-meaning mappings are shaped by cognitive pressures. However, diachronic evidence for such constraints remains relatively limited. A useful window for diachronic investigation is provided by the Japanese lexical pitch accent because it is part of the spoken form but is not encoded in the orthography, which may make its change sensitive to cognitive pressures. The purpose of this study was to test whether intergenerational change of lexical pitch-accent patterns in the Keihan dialect exhibits item-level selectivity predicted