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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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The study examined the proposal that word segmentation is influenced by listeners' sensitivity to language-universal syllabic structure as well as language-specific rhythmic structure. This hypothesis was tested in Japanese, which can be described in terms of syllabic (universal) and moraic (language-specific) units. The results of Experiment 1 showed that Japanese listeners exhibit minimal sensitivity to syllabic structure. Experiment 2 demonstrated that a modification in methodology was not the cause of the results found in Japanese. Findings provide little evidence in favor of a universal segmentation strategy, suggesting instead that listeners use only language-specific segmentation strategies.
Bibliographic reference. Yoneyama, Kiyoko / Pitt, Mark A. (1999): "Prelexical representations in Japanese: evidence from the structural induction paradigm", In ICPhS-14, 897-900.