Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Rendaku, or sequential voicing, is a morphophonemic process in Japanese in which the voiceless word-initial consonant of the second element (=E2) of a compound word becomes voiced (e.g., ori + kami →origami, ‘folding’ + ‘paper’ → ‘paper folding’, /k/ becomes /g/). In adult grammar, rendaku is subject to two conditions: It applies if and only if (a) E2 is a Yamato word (native vocabulary) in the lexicon and (b) it contains no voiced consonant (e.g., b, d, & g). Recent psycholinguistic studies have revealed that Japanese-speaking preschoolers do not follow adult’s grammar; they develop their original prosodically-based rendaku processing strategy (preschooler-specific rendaku strategy). Their strategies qualitatively change in the early middle childhood to be adult-like rendaku, creating a discontinuity in children’s word-processing strategies. This study investigated factors responsible for this developmental discontinuity. We conducted an experiment using cross- modal linguistic stimuli (prosody & orthography) to see whether children’s orthographic knowledge affects their rendaku strategy or not. Our results showed that orthographic cues affected literate children’s rendaku processing. They were aware the correspondence between types of orthography and word categories in Japanese.