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

Listeners' Representations of Within-Word Structure: Japanese Preschool Children

Takashi Otake (1), Kiyoko Yoneyama (2)

(1) Dokkyo University, Saitama, Japan
(2) Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

This study investigated how Japanese preschool children represented within-word structure, focusing on two phonological units, syllables and moras. The main question addressed in this study was how the acquisition of Japanese kana orthography influenced the choice of these units. The results of the three experiments showed that preschool children who were illiterate preferred syllable-sized representation and that the acquisition of kana syllabary facilitated to choose mora-sized representation for words containing a moraic nasal, but did not for words containing a geminate consonant and a long vowel.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Otake, Takashi / Yoneyama, Kiyoko (1999): "Listeners' representations of within-word structure: Japanese preschool children", In ICPhS-14, 2193-2196.