The effect of kana literacy acquisition on the speech segmentation unit used by Japanese young children

wThree experiments were undertaken to investigate whether young children's segmentation units would change as they learned to read kana letters, which represent morae (subsyllabic rhythmic units). The first 2 experiments used a vocal-motor segmentation task to examine whether 4- to 6-year-olds prefe rred to segment spoken words containing the special syllables CVN, CVQ, or CV: into syllables or into morae, The third experiment used a target monito ring task for CVN to examine whether children's detection of the target syl lable in a series of words would vary depending on the moraic constitution of the target and the moraic-syllabic status of the word initial in which t he target was embedded. Results indicated that the children's conscious seg mentation of words, except for those having a geminate stop consonant (CVQ) , developed from being a mixture of syllable- and mora-based to being predo minantly mora-based as they learned to read kana letters. The tendency towa rd mora-based segmentation was also found in the target monitoring task, wh ich required segmentation at a less conscious level. (C) 2000 Academic Pres s.