Although Japanese foot is known as a rhythmic unit in the literature of metrics, spontaneous Japanese speech is considered to be mora-timed and the perceptual property of foot as a timing unit is unknown. The present study investigated whether Japanese foot is of psychological reality by using an identification task of moraic rests between odd-numbered or even-numbered mora nonwords. The results showed that the absolute threshold of moraic rest was shorter if nonwords were pentamoraic (five morae) than tetramoraic (four morae), suggesting that odd-numbered mora words were easier to be perceived with moraic rest because of the structural stability of foot. This offers behavioral evidence for foot as a perceptual timing unit in spontaneous Japanese speech perception.
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