Hiromu Sakai (Hiroshima University)
Megumi Yoshimura (Hiroshima University and Japanese Science and Technology Agency)
Jun-Ichi Tanaka (Hiroshima University)
Robert Fiorentino (University of Maryland College Park)
Nina Kazanina (University of Ottawa)

　　　Native speakers can process linguistic input with remarkable speed and accuracy. Recent psycholinguistic researches reveal that various kinds of information are processed incrementally and bound together to obtain strong forward predictions that facilitate fast and accurate processing of subsequent elements. As an investigation into the mechanisms for incremental processing and the role of abstract phonemic representations, we conducted two experiments using a gating (or fragment presentation) paradigm on the online processing of allomorphic alternation in Japanese compound words.