Early automatic processing of lexical word accents : Valid words are stored holistically irrespective of stem tones
According to the dual route model of word processing (Pinker & Prince, 1991),morphologically irregular and frequent words are stored in the lexical memory as full-form neural representations. In contrast, regular and infrequent words are decomposed into morphemes. So far, it has been unclear whether a tonal element―a lexical word accent―is treated by the brain as a decomposable component or an
