416 A. Dowkeret al. Cahiers de Psychologie Cogrffive/ Current Psychology of Cognition 1998,17 (2), 417-450 (c) Poems containing similes (1) English, about the picture of the bird: The bird is flying in the sky Like a tiny aeroplane. Phonemic awareness in alphabetically literate (2) Italian, about the picture of the dog: Japanese adults: The influence of the first "Ho visto un cane chc abbaiava forte come un tuono E aveva gli occhi neri come il carbone". acquired writing system (I saw a dog who barked as loudly as thunder And had eyes as black as coal.) Miyoko Nakamura,1 Régine Kolinsky,2-3 (3) French, about the picture of the rabbit: Carmela Spagrioletti,4 and José Morais2 "Le lapin est rapide comme l'éclair Et léger comme une plume." (The rabbit is as fast as lightning 1. Keio University, Japan And as light as a feather.) 2. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium 3. Belgian F.N.R.S. (4) Polish, about the picture of the horse: 4. Institut des Langues yi^ptntes et de Phonétique, U.L.B., Belgium "Konjestpracowity Jak ta mala mrowka." (The horse is hardworking Abstract. The present study examined the nature of the metapho­ Like a little ant.) nological units that are used by Japanese native speakers who know both mora-based and phoneme-based writing systems. In three experiments, (5) Brazilian, about the picture of the cat: "Eu vi um gato preto como o carvao participants were asked to perform a reversal task. The results show Com os olhos azuls como o eel." that, in comparison to phonemes and syllables, moras are the most pro­ (I saw a cat as black as coal minent units in spontaneous reversal. On the other hand, the participants With eyes as blue as the sky.) were perfectly able to manipulate phonemes under request. Yet, detailed analysis of their phonemic reversals as well as introspective reports reveal that, when asked to reverse phonemes, most subjects used an interchange of written kana characters instead. While coherent with the notion that phonemes are not the major metaphonological units of Japanese, the use of such a strategy implies the ability to analyze CV kanas into their internal consonant-vowel constituents. Thus, whereas the nature of the first acquired writing system seems to exert a strong, pervasive influence on the native speaker's metaphonological proce­ dures, such language-specific procedures amount to the ability to per­ form metalinguistic operations at the phonemic level. Correspondence should be sent to Régine Kolinsky, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, Université Libre de Bruxelles, C.P. 191, Av. F. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Brussels, Belgium (e-mail: rkolins® ulb.ac.be). ;' 418 M,Nak^mura et al. Phonemic awareness in Japanese adults 419 INTRODUCTION | • CH0HOH ?h"..oIogical awareness is the very large and heterogeneous set of —saoH • conscious representations that are acquired by focusing attention on the à itr & & A £ £ & ,l *, *, perceptual representations of speech. This concept must be unpacked by <0 Ml * r> c Ç t, * t> specifying the phonological properties the individual is aware of. /•i/ /hi/ /ni/ /«/ /si/ mi l\ I Different forms of phonological awareness are presumably involved in ft H [t/iltfl] judging whether two nonsense utterances are identical or different, in Irai /Jul /ml Awl Inil /tu/ /su/ Au/ /u / deciding which of two evoked names is longer, in appreciating or using gui] [t sut] [m] rhymes and alliterations, and in analyzing short utterances intjauniis like n .* "* ta T # i+ * /«/ /he/ /ne/ /te/ , ^ *- syllables and phonemes (e.g., Morais, 1993). /re/ /se f The metaphonological as well as the phonological units of! Japanese may differ from those of English or French for at least two reasons, §/ à /*/ /à 4/ Z A, /*/ & ,ff namely the characteristics of both the Japanese phonology and the Japa­ nese writing system. At the level of the phonology, modern Japanese HMDAKUOK OAKUÛN tf ti language consists of 19 phonemes: five vowels (/a, i, u, e, of), two /pj/ « sr & semivowels (/j, w/), and 12 consonants (/p, b, t, d, k, g,Z'iJ%n, m, n. r/). Aal lai/ /a/ /ga/ As can be seen in Figure 1, some phonemes present various allophones [d=ïj U S t x (consider for example the different realizations of /h/)„ In addition, A>U A"/ /II/ /g(/ there are some special phonemes, sometimes referred to as archi- [d3Uf<t3i] phonemes (e.g., Shibatani, 1990), namely INI (called hatsuon); /Q/ . i- •S f <r (sokuon), and /R/ (choon), each of which constituting one mora by Ibul l<tol to/ /su/ itself. The nasal phoneme /N/ is peculiar in that it nevérlàppears at the [dsmJttau] onset of a syllable, and its articulation is homorganic wïtn; înje following *< "C tf (/ /be/ /de/ /»/ /se/ segment. In word final position it is realized as the uvular [N]. As for BzaJ the syllable structure, Japanese does not admit consonantal clusters at tî * -e c: syllable onsets and the sole possible coda consonants are either /N/ or /bo/ /do/ /»/ /,„/ the first member of a heterosyllabic geminate cluster. Besides, phonetic [dso] length is distinctive for both consonants and vowels,, as. illustrated by ÏCCM HANOABW minimal pairs like [saka]-[sakka] ("slope", "writer%j^1itpri]-[to:ri] ÛAKU0N • QMKUŒt 1 t>* •%•* Q.V *,- I ("bird", "street"). ' ' -' /bj*/ /zj»/ /ij»/ /g%* d /rja/ /«ja/ /hjj/ /£„ "j ' The phonological interpretation of vowel or consonant length is often £ 3»][d3»l /s 17* EïalCtJ-aJCfa] described by using the notion of mora. The mora is usually considered /PJW Ibjul /zju/ /lJu/ /^ /rju/ /.ju/ /hju/ /tj„/ j,J [d3ar][d nl /s to be a subsyllabic unit that can be larger than the phoneme; and serves 31 M [t/mirror] the purpose of measuring syllabic weight (Hyman, 1985j.;Ma|yes, 1989). /pjo/ g* Sx C^ éTj: 0Jt *JS Oi ç> t > AjO/ /ZJO/ /Ijo/ /gjo/ /rjo/ /.jo/ /hje/ /tV/ /^ Id3*]{43o] M [t/o]fjo] 1. We will transcribe vowel length with the sign (:) according to the conven­ tion of the International Phonetic Alphabet. ^S^S*"*^ *"•- -—* M *«_ 420 M. Nakamura et al. Phonemic awareness in Japanese adults 421 In Japanese, light syllables (i.e., open syllables containing a short production side, reports of speech errors tend to support either the CV vowel) contrast with heavy ones (i.e., open syllables containing a long syllable (Kamio & TonoikeJ 1979) or the mora (Kubozono, 1992) as a vowel, and closed syllables). Stated differently, a short vowel (preceded basic phonological unit of Japanese. Yet Terao (1992) reports that in his or not by an onset consonant) counts as one mora, a long vowel counts study only 9% of errors involved the replacement of the whole mora as two, and each coda consonant counts as an extra mora.2 whereas the remaining cases preserved either the vowel or the con­ As regards the writing system, the traditional Japanese system is sonant. Consequently 91% of Terao's corpus of errors can be inter­ generally described as being based on two kinds of signs, namely ideo­ preted as resulting from an interchange of phonemes. grams of Chinese origin, the kanji, and two sets of Japanese so-called As regards speech perception, Otake, Hatano, Cutler, and Mehler syllabic phonograms that stand in a perfect one-to-one correspondence (1993) found evidence that the mora, rather than the syllable, was in­ to each other, namely hiragana and katakana. Lexical morphemes such volved in a fragment-detection task. Indeed, when asked to monitor a as nouns as well as verbal and adjectival roots are usually transcribed by list of auditory items for the presence of a word with an initial CVC kanji characters, whereas grammatical morphemes and function words sequence such as TAN, Japanese listeners often missed the target in are written by means of hiragana. Katakana is primarily used for loan carrier words like tanishi. This is supposed to be due to the fact that the words and onomatopoeia. In the everyday life, all three kinds of charac­ matching would require an internal analysis of the mora ni. A criticism ters are usually combined in the same text. Besides, the Roman alpha­ may be raised in that the ^|fect may recognize in the target TAN the bet, romaji, is used for the sake of international communication (essen­ phoneme /N/, hatsuon, which can only appear at the end of a syllable. If tially for proper nouns) and more recently for operating computerized this is the case, then the nasal phoneme that appears in the second mora, word processors. Romaji transcribes each kama character into an alpha­ or syllable, of tanishi is not the same as the final phoneme of the target. betic sequence.3 This in turn would explain why the subjects failed to recognize the Hiragana as welt as katakana are taught at school by using a table in target in such words whereas they recognized it in words like tanshi in which the characters are arranged in a systematic way. As illustrated by which the nasal consonant is indeed a hatsuon /N/. Moreover, taking Figure 1, columns and rows are organized so that all the kanas appear­ into account the phonetic level Only does not always lead to a match ei­ ing in the same column begin with the same consonantal sound, except ther. Indeed, the material^usepmcludes pairs of words such as monaka- the first column which contains the five vowels, and all the kanas of the monka in which n is dental ([n]) in the first member and velar QIJ]) in same row share the same vowel. This reference table is called gojuonzu the second member of the pair (this was the case for five out of eight (literally "50-sounds table") after the original table of old Japanese.