A Psycholinguistic Perspective on Finnish and Japanese Prosody

In this monograph Katsura Aoyama presents a series of psycholinguistic investigations on consonantal distinctions in Finnish and Japanese. The author deftly describes differences in adult production, perception, and child acquisition of these distinctions. This is an important work for those interested in recent developments in theoretical and psycholinguistics.

Klappentext

In this monograph emKatsura Aoyama/em presents a series of psycholinguistic investigations on consonantal distinctions in Finnish and Japanese. The author deftly describes differences in adult production, perception, and child acquisition of these distinctions. This is an important work for those interested in recent developments in theoretical and psycholinguistics.

Inhalt
1: Introduction.- 2: Background.- 2.1 Quantity contrasts in Finnish and Japanese phonology.- 2.2 Geminates and the mora.- 2.3 The mora-timing hypothesis.- 3: Preliminary survey: Frequencies of long vowels and geminate consonants in Finnish and Japanese.- 3.1 Purpose of the survey.- 3.2 Research questions.- 3.3 Method.- 3.4 Results.- 3.5 Summary: Implication for the experiments.- 4: Discrimination boundary between the single and geminate consonants.- 4.1 Purpose of the experiments and research questions.- 4.2 Experiment 1. Single/geminate nasal boundary in Finnish: production.- 4.3 Experiment 2. Single/geminate nasal boundary in Japanese: production.- 4.4 Discussion of experiments 1 and 2.- 4.5 Experiment 3. Single/geminate nasal boundary in Finnish: perception.- 4.6 Experiment 4. Single/geminate nasal boundary in Japanese: perception.- 4.7 Discussion of experiments 3 and 4.- 4.8 Summary.- 5: Discrimination boundary between the single and geminate consonants: A cross-linguistic study.- 5.1 Purpose of the experiments and research questions.- 5.2 Experiment 5: Finnish speakers'perception of Japanese nasal quantity contrasts.- 5.3 Experiment 6: Japanese speakers' perception of Finnish nasal quantity contrasts.- 5.4 Discussion of experiment 5 and 6.- 5.5 Summary of experiments 5 and 6.- 6: Acquisition of the nasal quantity contrasts.- 6.1 The acquisition of prosody.- 6.2 Purpose of the experiments and research questions.- 6.3 Experiment 7: The acquisition of nasal quantity contrast in Finnish.- 6.4 Experiment 8: The acquisition of nasal quantity contrast in Japanese.- 6.5 Discussion of experiments 7 and 8.- 6.6 Summary of experiments 7 and 8.- 7: Discussion: Overall cross-linguistic comparison.- 7.1 Geminates and singletons.- 7.2 Phonological representations andphonological processing.- 7.3 Mora-timing reconsidered.- 8: Summary and conclusion.- References.- Appendix II: Sample pictures and questions.- Appendix III: Data from experiments 1 and 2.- Appendix IV: Data from experiments 3 and 4.- Appendix V: Data from experiments 5 and 6.- Appendix VI: Data from experiments 7 and 8.