Non-native listeners’ representations of within-word structure

Abstract

Human listeners may form conscious representations of potential within-word structure in which lexicon is represented by some phonological units. An earlier study examining monolingual speakers of Japanese and English with native inputs suggests that levels of representation by Japanese speakers may be involved with richer knowledge of word-internal structure, while English speakers are sensitive to syllables [Otake et al., Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 95 3, 1703–1706 (1995)]. The present study investigated how monolingual speakers of English learning Japanese could form conscious representations of potential within-word structure in Japanese. Three groups of subjects (N: 36, 33, and 40 for three different levels) were presented with 150 Japanese spoken words and asked to mark on a written transcript of each word the second natural division point from the onset in the word. The statistical analysis showed that all groups exploited syllables to represent Japanese words irrespective of Japanese proficiency. These results suggest that the exploitation of phonological unit to represent within-word structure in foreign inputs may be the same as the one in the native input as proposed by our recent pilot work (Otake and Yamamoto, 134th Meeting of the ASA 101). [Work supported by Fulbright senior research grant and TAF.]