14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Syllable Counting and Mora Units in Speech Perception

Donna Erickson (1,2), Reiko Akahane-Yamada (3), Keiichi Tajima (3), Kaori F. Matsumoto (2)

(1) The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
(2) Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan
(3) ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan

This paper represents a preliminary study in a longer-range project in which rhythm is considered a central organizing factor in speech perception and production. Our hypothesis is that the ability to perceive the rhythm-bearing unit of L2 (second language) substantially improves the L1 (first language) listener's ability to perceive the spoken L2 language. The preliminary study here reports on an initial investigation of a corollary hypothesis: Japanese listeners have difficulty perceiving the basic rhythm-bearing units of English.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Erickson, Donna / Akahane-Yamada, Reiko / Tajima, Keiichi / Matsumoto, Kaori F. (1999): "Syllable counting and mora units in speech perception", In ICPhS-14, 1479-1482.