Abstract:

Assuming that listeners may form conscious representations of potential within-word structure, it was investigated what phonological units could be exploited by monolingual speakers of Japanese and English [Otake et al., Proc. EUROSPEECH 95, 1703--1706 (1995)]. The present study investigated how bilingual Japanese speakers of English and monolingual speakers of Japanese and English could from conscious representations of potential within-word structure in the two languages. The three groups of subjects were presented with spoken words in both languages and asked to mark on a written transcript of each word (e.g., buranko for Japanese and veranda for English) the second natural division point from the onset in the word. The statistical analysis showed that both the Japanese and English monolinguals exploited morae and syllables, respectively, and that the bilinguals exploited syllables. These results suggest that the exploitation of phonological units to represent within-word structure may depend upon the degree to which the structure of the language being acquired encourages the use of the units and that the system of the representation may be highly compatible with speech segmentation procedures [Cutler et al., Cogn. Psychol. 24, 381--410 (1992)]. [Work supported by a Fulbright senior research grant and TAF.]