THE REPRESENTATION OF JAPANESE MORAIC NASALS

Nasal consonants in syllabic coda position in Japanese assimilate to t he place of articulation of a following consonant. The resulting forms may be perceived as different realizations of a single underlying uni t, and indeed the kana orthographies represent them with a single char acter. In the present study, Japanese listeners' response time to dete ct nasal consonants was measured. Nasals in coda position, i.e., morai c nasals, were detected faster and more accurately than nonmoraic nasa ls, as reported in previous studies. The place of articulation with wh ich moraic nasals were realized affected neither response time nor acc uracy. Non-native subjects who knew no Japanese, given the same materi als with the same instructions, simply failed to respond to moraic nas als which were realized bilabially. When the nasals were cross-spliced across place of articulation contexts the Japanese Listeners still sh owed no significant place of articulation effects, although responses were faster and more accurate to unspliced than to cross-spliced nasal s. When asked to detect the phoneme following the (cross-spliced) mora ic nasal, Japanese listeners showed effects of mismatch between nasal and context, but non-native listeners did not. Together, these results suggest that Japanese listeners are capable of very rapid abstraction from phonetic realization to a unitary representation of moraic nasal s; but they can also use the phonetic realization of a moraic nasal ef fectively to obtain anticipatory information about following phonemes. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of America.