Phonological development and prosodic units: Evidence from metathesis errors

Abstract

There is general agreement in the literature that the ability to recognize that words are made up of “smaller phonological units” within the phonological hierarchy is a prerequisite for reading, however, there is still much debate as to which specific units are important. Many studies dealing with Japanese phonological development have been conducted, but most deal mainly with the mora unit, and few actually focus on other prosodic levels. In this paper, we will focus on the prosodic development of Japanese, with particular attention to the relationship of the different prosodic levels, namely, that of the foot, syllable and mora. The result of the reversal tasks seems to imply that the relationship between the foot and syllable units plays a role in the phonological processing of Japanese, implying the importance of focusing on phonological units other than the mora in order to correctly assess a child’s phonological processing ability.