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Mora or syllable? Which unit do Japanese use in naming visually presented stimuli?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2004

KATSUO TAMAOKA  and
YASUSHI TERAO
KATSUO TAMAOKA
Affiliation:
Hiroshima University
YASUSHI TERAO
Affiliation:
University of Shizuoka
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Abstract

Because the Japanese phonetic script (i.e., kana) represents moraic units, it is often claimed that Japanese people assemble phonology at the moraic unit. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the unit for naming visually presented stimuli, focusing on the special nasals /N/, geminates /Q/, long vowels /R/, and dual vowels /J/. The special sounds create two morae when there is only one syllable. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the production of three-mora, three-syllable and three-mora, two-syllable real, and nonsense words. The findings indicated that native Japanese speakers named the three-mora words containing the special sounds more quickly. Accordingly, it is posited that special sounds are named as syllable units rather than moraic units.

Type
Research Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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