Submoraic Awareness by Children: Evidence Fro

The present study has attempted to investigate the relationship between morae and phonemes with respect to phonological awareness by Japanese school children. The main question addressed in this study is whether Japanese school children can be aware of phonemes as a submoraic unit in Japanese if they are given the information on the internal structure of morae. Two experiments were conducted with two groups of Japanese elementary school children with and without alphabetic knowledge, employing a novel apparatus which can make them understood the relationship intuitively. The results show that Japanese school children regardless of alphabetic knowledge can recognize the relationship between them. This suggests that they can access to the phonemic level if they are provided with the appropriate information.