Segmentation strategies for spoken language recognition: evidence from semi-bilingual Japanese speakers of English

The present study investigates speech segmentation of English by semi-bilingual Japanese speaker of English. Two experiments were conducted with forty subjects. The first experiment used a syllable-monitoring task and the results did not show a moraic segmentation strategy, which is a language-specific segmentation strategy for native speakers of Japanese. This suggests that they employed a general or segment-by-segment sub-lexical segmentation strategy rather than a language-specific moraic segmentation strategy for accessing the lexicon. The second experimental used a phoneme monitoring task and here the results supported a language-specific moraic segmentation. Taken together, experiments suggest that semi-bilingual Japanese speaker have two segmentation strategies for spoken language recognition, supporting a model proposed by Cutler and colleagues. These results also suggest that these semi-bilingual only partly suppress their native language-specific segmentation, which makes them comparable to the perfectly balanced French-English bilingual in a study by Cutler and colleagues.