12 - On blending and the mora: comments on Kubozono

Summary

Introduction

In his paper, Kubozono nicely summarizes the literature on the mora as a salient unit in speech production in Japanese, and then describes new results which he takes as evidence for the mora as a comparably salient unit in speech perception. His experiments presented pairs of English CVC monosyllables, such as hill and top, to which subjects responded with a third word blending the two stimulus words. Responses differed for different subject groups; English speakers combined the onset of the first word with the rhyme of the second (hill + top = hop), whereas Japanese speakers usually took both the onset and the nucleus from the first word and only the coda consonant from the second (hill + top = hip). Pilot results for two Italian and nine Spanish speakers also showed the Japanese pattern.

Kubozono interprets these results as indicating a difference in syllable-internal prosodic structure among the languages, illustrated in (la) for English and (lb) for the other three, (lc) is Derwing, Yoon & Cho's (1993) alternative interpretation of the Japanese pattern of responses, which their Korean subjects also showed in a similar word-blend experiment. The difference between hypotheses (lb) and (lc) should not obscure the premise in common: Kubozono, like Derwing et al. (1993), takes the pattern of blends as evidence that speakers parse syllables exhaustively into some set of syllable-internal prosodic constituents which can differ from language to language.