Children's Use of Orthographic Cues in Language Processing.

要旨

Rendaku, or sequential voicing, is a morphophonemic\nprocess in Japanese in which the voiceless word-initial\nconsonant of the second element (=E2) of a compound word\nbecomes voiced (e.g., ori + kami →origami, ‘folding’ +\n‘paper’ → ‘paper folding’, /k/ becomes /g/). In adult\ngrammar, rendaku is subject to two conditions: It applies if\nand only if (a) E2 is a Yamato word (native vocabulary) in\nthe lexicon and (b) it contains no voiced consonant (e.g., b, d,\n& g). Recent psycholinguistic studies have revealed that\nJapanese-speaking preschoolers do not follow adult’s\ngrammar; they develop their original prosodically-based\nrendaku processing strategy (preschooler-specific rendaku\nstrategy). Their strategies qualitatively change in the early\nmiddle childhood to be adult-like rendaku, creating a\ndiscontinuity in children’s word-processing strategies. This\nstudy investigated factors responsible for this developmental\ndiscontinuity. We conducted an experiment using cross-\nmodal linguistic stimuli (prosody & orthography) to see\nwhether children’s orthographic knowledge affects their\nrendaku strategy or not. Our results showed that\northographic cues affected literate children’s rendaku\nprocessing. They were aware the correspondence between\ntypes of orthography and word categories in Japanese.

主題