Durational correlates of Japanese phonemic quantity contrasts by Cantonese-speaking L2 learners

This paper reports a production study of Japanese phonemic quantity contrasts by native speakers, beginner learners, and advanced learners speaking Cantonese as L1. The three groups were compared using various standard durational measures. It was found that both learner groups successfully distinguished all the quantity conditions, although they did so differently from their Japanese peers. Specifically, whereas the short vs. long contrasts were enhanced in slow speech by native speakers, such enhancement was absent in both learner groups. The pedagogical and typological implications of these data are discussed.published_or_final_versio

Perception and Production of Geminate Timing in Hungarian Voiceless Stops

Hungarian is a language that expresses semantic differences using contrastive consonant length. Previous research in many languages confirmed that duration is the most important acoustic correlate of the singleton-geminate contrast. The present study aims to examine the acoustic and perceptual correlates which distinguish single stops from their geminate counterparts in Hungarian. The main question is how closure duration contributes to the perception and production of the length contrast of voiceless stops? Results confirmed that closure duration is the main acoustic attribute that distinguishes between singletons and geminate stops in Hungarian, and it is a sufficient cue for discriminating them in perception as well. Analysis of the relationship between consonant and preceding vowel duration did not support the strategy of temporal compensation. Findings are supposed to explore the relationship between the acoustic and perceptual domains and shed light on the primary/secondary acoustic features of consonant length opposition in Hungarian

Identifying the locus of L2 pronunciation: an exploratory study of geminate production by Chinese L2 learners of Japanese

Chinese L2 learners of Japanese are identified as showing difficulties in the production of Japanese geminates. The idea of being difficult-to-listen is embodied in the concept Comprehensibility (Derwing & Munro 2015). This study first reviews the native pronunciation of Japanese singleton vs. geminate contrast. Then, we report findings based on the pronunciation by 20 Chinese learners of Japanese and discuss the issue of comprehensibility in geminate production. While the contrast in the closure duration between singleton and geminate consonants shows a similar pattern to reported Japanese speech, the learners show large differences in the vowel duration preceding and following consonants. We report findings from a linear mixed model that was run with speaker as a random effect. The results show that participants do not make differences in vowel duration, or the difference in vowel duration is reversed from L1 Japanese speakers. Identifying the locus of the source of an L2 accent should be accompanied with intelligibility and comprehensibility. Such identification is important in increasing comprehensibility in speech that is already intelligible

Geminated Liquids in Japanese: A production study

While the Japanese language makes use of consonant length contrast abundantly, liquid geminates are disfavored. The status of geminated liquids in Japanese is marginal, only appearing in particular loanwords and through emphatic gemination. However, to the extent that they are attested, geminated liquids in Japanese offer a unique window into the abstract representation of geminates and liquids in general.The foremost goal of this dissertation is to fill the gap in the literature by providing a detailed documentation of the production of geminated liquids in Japanese. Based on the results of an experiment using EMA (electromagnetic articulography), I report the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of geminated liquids in Japanese, focusing on the variability and similarity across productions.The acoustic results indicate that while the local durational correlates for geminated liquids are quite variable, their durational contrast with singletons is strikingly robust and similar to that of more established geminates at a global level. Furthermore, while the non-durational acoustic correlates exhibit a wide range of inter- and intra-speaker variability, all the productions of geminated liquids demonstrate prolonged duration and high sonority in one way or another.The articulatory results suggest that liquids in Japanese are gesturally complex, as has been pointed out for other languages. Singleton and geminate liquids can be characterized with a rising tongue tip gesture and relatively retracted tongue body. Otherwise, speakers use variable strategies to produce liquids, with lateral and retroflex flavors. Results also show that liquids take up a lateral flavor of production in high-vowel environments, consistent with previous claims that rhotics are incompatible with palatalization. They also show that speakers and productions vary in terms of the gestural timing to lengthen liquids, suggesting multiple gestural strategies for the process of gemination.The acoustic and articulatory variability demonstrated in the results are consistent with the view that Japanese liquid /r/ is highly underspecified. An alternative explanation appealing to the marginal status of geminated liquids is discussed. The acoustic and articulatory results, taken together, also suggest that the production of geminates is governed by acoustic targets rather than a universal gestural target shared by all speakers

Cross-Linguistic Perception and Learning of Mandarin Chinese Sounds by Japanese Adult Learners

This dissertation presents a cross-linguistic investigation of how nonnative sounds are perceived by second language (L2) learners in terms of their first language (L1) categories for an understudies language pair---Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Category mapping experiment empirically measured the perceived phonetic distances between Chinese sounds and their most resembling Japanese categories, which generated testable predictions on discriminability of Chinese sound contrasts according to Perception Assimilation Model (PAM). Category discrimination experiment obtained data concerning L2 learners' actual performance on discrimination Chinese sounds. The discrepancy between PAM's predictions and actual performances revealed that PAM cannot be applied to L2 perceptual learning. It was suggested that the discriminability of L2 sound contrasts was not only determined by perceived phonetic distances but probably involved other factors, such as the distinctiveness of certain phonetic features, e.g. aspiration and retroflexion. The training experiment assessed the improvement of L2 learners' performance in identifying Chinese sound contrasts with exposure to high variability stimuli and feedback. The results not only proved the effectiveness of training in shaping L2 learners' perception but showed that the training effects were generalizable to new tokens spoken by unfamiliar talkers. In addition to perception, the production of Chinese sounds by Japanese learners was also examined from the phonetic perspective in terms of perceived foreign accentedness. Regression of L2 learners' and native speakers foreign accentedness ratings against acoustic measurements of their speech production revealed that although both segmental and suprasegmental variables contributed to the perception of foreign accent, suprasegmental variables such as total and intonation patterns were the most influential factor in predicting perceived foreign accent. To conclude, PAM failed to accurately predict learning difficulties of nonnative sounds faced by L2 learners solely based on perceived phonetic distances. As Speech Learning Model (SLM) hypothesizes, production was found to be driven by perception, since equivalence classification of L2 sounds to L1 categories prevented the establishment of a new phonological category, thus further resulted in divergence in L2 production. Although production was hypothesized to eventually resemble perception, asynchrony between production and perception was observed due to different mechanisms involved

Language Science Meets Cognitive Science: Categorization and Adaptation

Questions of domain-generality—the extent to which multiple cognitive functions are represented and processed in the same manner—are common topics of discussion in cognitive science, particularly within the realm of language. In the present dissertation, I examine the domain-specificity of two processes in speech perception: category learning and rate adaptation. With regard to category learning, I probed the acquisition of categories of German fricatives by English and German native speakers, finding a bias in both groups towards quicker acquisition of non-disjunctive categories than their disjunctive counterparts. However, a study using an analogous continuum of non-speech sounds, in this case spectrally-rotated musical instrument sounds, did not show such a bias, suggesting that at least some attributes of the phonetic category learning process are unique to speech. For rate adaptation, meanwhile, I first report a study examining rate adaptation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), where consonant length is a contrastive part of the phonology; that is, where words can be distinguished from one another by the length of the consonants that make them up. I found that changing the rate of the beginning of a sentence can lead a consonant towards the end of the sentence to change in its perceived duration; a short consonant can sound like a long one, and a long consonant can sound like a short one. An analogous experiment examined rate adaptation in event segmentation, where adaptation-like effects had not previously been explored, using recordings of an actor interacting with a touchscreen. I found that the perception of actions can also be affected by the rate of previously-occurring actions. Listeners adapt to the rate at the beginning of a series of actions when deciding what they saw last in that series of actions. This suggests that rate adaptation follows similar lines across both domains. All told, this dissertation leads to a picture of domain-specificity in which both domain-general and domain-specific processes can operate, with domain-specific processes can help scaffold the use of domain-general processing