It is discussed that the research direction of phonetics has been different as that of cognitive studies in speech perception. A case of the cognitive studies is introduced to show the difference. The studies based on cross-linguistics showed clearly the effects of phonotactic constraint on speech perception. The effects observed are consonant deletion and vowel epenthesis, which occurs in prelexical level and is irrelevant to top down effect of lexical processing. Finally, the scope of the phonetics studies integrated with the studies of cognitive science are proposed to make a profound progress in future.

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The article explores the relevance of phonology or inner speech activation in processing printed words and sentences. The first half of it focuses on the phonological activation in accessing written words, particularly in understanding the word meaning. Attempts are made to list up the factors affecting lexical processing, which is then to be followed by the introduction of the major lexical access models. The orthography-to-meaning lexical access is discussed by means of the psycholinguistic dual coding model suggested by Kadota (2002) and others, which corresponds largely to the Iwata's (1996) neuropsychological model of processing Kanji-Kana words. The second half of the present article turns its attention to the role of inner phonological activation in comprehending the written textual materials. After reviewing some of the major psycholinguistic works, the author provides a piece of empirical evidence in which for Japanese EFL learners the phonological coding is shown to be specifically occurring in reading rather than in listening. Also suggested is a tentative diagram incorporating both phonological-analytic and visuospatial-global processing channels, based upon the Baddeley's working memory model.

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This paper discusses the structure of the lexicon and its stored representations used for lexical access from a literature review on speech segmentation and adult auditory word recognition models. This paper is organized as follows: After a short introduction in Section 1, Section 2 provides a view from that phonological structure of the language emerges in order to find connections among meaning, acoustic input and production, those of which do not have a one-to-one correspondence. Section 3 reports a review of studies on speech segmentation that provides types of phonological information used for lexical access. In section 4, stored representations used for lexical access are discussed by summa- rizing the characteristics of the current proposed word recognition models for adult listeners. Finally, a summary of this paper and the contribution of phonetic research in Cognitive Science are discussed in Section 5.

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The present paper briefly reviews five areas of Japanese pitch accent research: phonological, phonetic, engineering, physiological, and psychological studies. Each area is assessed in terms of the contribution to the field of cognitive science. Problems in current research models and future directions are also discussed.

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[in Japanese]

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This article reviews some basic issues on spoken-word recognition, focussing on the mechanism of speech segmentation and a role of prosody. First, the mechanism of speech segmentation is discussed with reference to the rhythmic hypothesis. Second, the role of prosody in spoken-word recognition is discussed with the illustration of the phoneme activation model. It is argued that unlike the prosody in English and Chinese, the prosody in Japanese is involved with the selection of words in mental lexicon.

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[in Japanese]

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In Arabic weak verbs, containing glides as root consonants, glides are sometimes altered to high vowels or deleted, whereas the other root consonants are not. In this study, I analyze glide/vowel alternations in Arabic weak verbs with the segregated faithful constraints, following Correspondence Theory of McCarthy & Prince (1995), which suggests that root-faithfulness should be segregated from affix-faithfulness. Furthermore I assume that there are structurally different types of affixes: vowel affixes and personal affixes, and different kinds of phonological constraints function separately for each case.

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Effects of pitch type and syllable position in identifying Japanese long and short vowels were examined for Japanese learners whose native language was either English or Korean. The subjects judged whether the stimulus included a long vowel and where in the stimulus the long vowel occurred. The English and Korean speakers showed similar effects of pitch and syllable position. The vowel labeled "H" (high pitch accent) tended to be perceived as long, whereas the vowel labeled "L" (low pitch) tended to be perceived as short. Pitch effects were more prominent in word final position than in non-final position and vowel identification was more difficult in word final position. Previous studies examined only duration effects, however, this study revealed that pitch also influences non-native listeners in their identification of long and short vowels.

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This paper is concerned with how n-/l- (or r-) variation in loanwords among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong takes place in different phonetic environments. Previous researches point out that the ongoing merger of n- into l- in a syllable initial position in Cantonese often has influences on the borrowing of words from other languages and the learning of foreign languages. For example, when they introduce English words into Cantonese, Cantonese speakers are likely to realise n- as l- like "notes" /nouts/ as [lok. si]. Our survey with 204 non-sense words written in Japanese hiragana, however, shows that there is no statistical significance between the percentage of errors of n- and l- (or r-) in any phonetic environment except when a nasal precedes r-. In that case, it is realised as n- significantly. The result may suggest that n-/l- (or r-) variation in loanwords among the Cantonese speakers occurs in a two-way manner, namely n- → l- and l- → n-, which is a new finding when compared with the previous researches.

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