Phonological units in speech segmentation and phonological awareness

This paper explores the relationship between phonological units in speech segmentation and phonological awareness by investigating Japanese Brazilians living in Japan. The first experiment investigated the size of the phonological unit in speech segmentation using the Japanese materials and methodology in Otake et al. (1993). As for French subjects in the earlier study, the miss rates showed an effect of syllabic segmentation, suggesting that the Japanese Brazilians segmented Japanese into syllables. The second experiment investigated phonological units in phonological awareness. using a mid-chunk-unit search task in which subjects were asked to identity the middle unit within a word. 96% of the mid-chunk unit choices were syllable-based. The results of the two experiments suggest that Japanese Brazilians exploit syllables both as a speech segmentation unit and as a unit to represent within-word structure.