The latter are quotation marks, equivalent to " " in English. For example, the sentence:
Mr Tanaka said "Good morning". could be written as something like た
could be written as something like:
たなかさんは「おはよう」といいました。
The latterformer may be a little different in different contexts, but one way it's used is to lengthen vowels when you write words in katakana. So, for example, the word for Australia, "Oosutoraria", is written as
オーストラリア
Note that when you write text vertically (as is traditional in Japanese), the vowel lengthening symbol is also written vertically (|).
You can find more about these symbols in the Wikipedia articles on Japanese punctuation and the List of Japanese typographic symbols.