title: The functional unit of Japanese word naming: evidence from masked priming.
abstract: Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed more light on the functional unit of phonological encoding in Japanese, a language often described as being mora based, we report the results of 4 experiments using word reading tasks and masked priming. Experiment 1 demonstrated using Japanese kana script that primes, which overlapped in the whole mora with target words, sped up word reading latencies but not when just the onset overlapped. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated a possible role of script by using combinations of romaji (Romanized Japanese) and hiragana; again, facilitation effects were found only when the whole mora and not the onset segment overlapped. Experiment 4 distinguished mora priming from syllable priming and revealed that the mora priming effects obtained in the first 3 experiments are also obtained when a mora is part of a syllable. Again, no priming effect was found for single segments. Our findings suggest that the mora and not the segment (phoneme) is the basic functional phonological unit in Japanese language production planning.
authors: Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition and Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, P. O. Box 9555, NL-2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands. r.verdonschot@hum.leidenuniv.nl
authors: Rinus G
authors: RG
authors: Verdonschot
authors: Sachiko
authors: S
authors: Kiyama
authors: Katsuo
authors: K
authors: Tamaoka
authors: Sachiko
authors: S
authors: Kinoshita
authors: Wido La
authors: WL
authors: Heij
authors: Niels O
authors: NO
authors: Schiller
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult