Abstract
The present study investigated how monolingual speakers of Japanese and English and bilingual Japanese speakers of English were sensitive to syllables and morae in the two languages. They were presented with spoken words in both languages and asked to mark on a written transcript of each word (e.g., buranko for Japanese and veranda for English) the second natural division point from the onset of the word. The statistical analysis showed that both the Japanese and English monolinguals were sensitive to morae and syllables, respectively, and that the bilinguals were sensitive to syllables in English but neither to syllables nor to morae in Japanese. These results suggest that while monolinguals may be sensitive to a single unit, bilinguals may have access to plural units in the mental lexicon.
