Open AccessThe effects of prosodic features and wordlikeness on nonword repetition performance among young Japanese children 1
Author(s) -
YUZAWA MASAMICHI,
SAITO SATORU,
GATHERCOLE SUSAN,
YUZAWA MIKI,
SEKIGUCHI MICHIHIKO
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5884.2010.00448.x
Subject(s) - repetition (rhetorical device) , psychology , stress (linguistics) , lexicon , contrast (vision) , linguistics , cognitive psychology , vocabulary , audiology , speech recognition , computer science , artificial intelligence , medicine , philosophy
This study investigated how prosodic aspects and wordlikeness of nonwords affect young Japanese children's repetition of nonwords. We contrasted two conditions in which a nonword comprised of two morae was pronounced with and without a small pause between the two morae. We also manipulated accent patterns of presentation of nonwords. The results indicated that the presence of a small pause in a nonword had a facilitating effect on the repetition of nonwords. The advantage of high‐wordlike sequences over low‐wordlike sequences was observed only when the sequence was presented without a pause. In contrast, the effect of accent patterns of presentation interacted with vocabulary sizes of children. These results were interpreted in terms of the framework of phonological working memory and the segmentation of the spoken Japanese language.