The functional unit in phonological encoding: evidence for moraic representation in native Japanese speakers.

Full Abstract

Speech production studies have shown that the phonological form of a word is made up of phonemic segments in stress-timed languages (e.g., Dutch) and of syllables in syllable-timed languages (e.g., Chinese). To clarify the functional unit of mora-timed languages, the authors asked native Japanese speakers to perform an implicit priming task (A. S. Meyer, 1990, 1991). In Experiment 1, participants could speed up their production latencies when initial consonant and vowel (CV) of a target word were known in advance but failed to do so when the vowel was unknown. In Experiment 2, prior knowledge of the consonant and glide (Cj) produced no significant priming effect. However, in Experiment 3, significant effects were found for the consonant-vowel coupled with a nasal coda (CVN) and the consonant with a diphthong (CVV), compared with the consonant-vowel alone (CV). These results suggest that the implicit priming effects for Japanese are closely related to the CV-C and CV-V structure, called the mora. The authors discuss cross-linguistic differences in the phonological representation involved in phonological encoding, within current theories of word production.Copyright 2006 APA

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Author information

Author/s: Kureta, Yoichi (Y); Fushimi, Takao (T); Tatsumi, Itaru F (IF);

Affiliation: Language, Cognition, and Brain Research Group, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Tokyo, Japan. kureta(-atsign-)tmig.or.jp

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Sep; vol 32 (issue 5) : pp 1102-19

Dates: Created 2006/08/29; Completed 2006/12/20;

PMID: 16938049, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Male
Phonetics
Reaction Time - physiology
Speech - physiology
Speech Perception - physiology
Verbal Behavior - physiology

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