Recent studies in spoken word recognition show that Japanese listeners with or without alphabetic knowledge are accessible to phonemes during word activation. This suggests that even mora-based language users can recognize a submoraic unit. The present study investigates a possibility of latent ability to manipulate phonemes to search and to construct new words by Japanese preliterates in Roman alphabet. Three experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1 it was tested whether they could search embedded words by deleting word initial consonants. In Experiments 2 and 3 it was tested whether they could construct new words by manipulating consonants and vowels at word initial and medial positions. The results show that they could successfully manage these tasks with high accuracy. These results suggests that they are likely to have latent ability to manipulate phonemes to search and to construct new words.
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