Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityPerception of Japanese quantity by Swedish speakinglearners: A preliminary analysisMiyoko InoueDepartment of Japanese Language & Culture, Nagoya University, JapanAbstractSwedish learners’ perception of Japanesequantity was investigated by means of an identificationtask. Swedish informants performedsimilarly to native Japanese listeners inshort/long identification of both vowel andconsonant. The Swedish and Japanese listenersreacted similarly both to the durational variationand to the F0 change despite the differentuse of F0 fall in relation with quantity in theirL1.IntroductionA quantity language is a language that has aphonological length contrast in vowels and/orconsonants. Japanese and Swedish are known assuch languages, and they employ both vowelsand consonants for the long/short contrast (Han,1965, for Japanese; Elert, 1964, for Swedish).Both of the languages use duration as a primaryacoustic cue to distinguish the long/short contrast.Quantity in Japanese is known to be difficultto acquire for learners (e.g. Toda, 2003), however,informants in previous research havemainly been speakers of non-quantity languages.In their research on L2 quantity in Swedish,McAllister et al. (2002) concluded that the degreeof success in learning L2 Swedish quantityseemed to be related to the role of the durationfeature in learners’ L1. It can, then, be anticipatedthat Swedish learners of Japanese may berelatively successful in acquiring Japanesequantity. The present study, thus, aims to investigatewhether Swedish learners are able toperform similarly to the Japanese in the perceptionof Japanese quantity of vowels and consonants.In addition to duration, there can be otherphonetic features that might supplement thequantity distinction in quantity languages. InSwedish, quality is such an example, but such afeature may not be necessarily utilized in otherlanguages. For example, quality does not seemto be used in the quantity contrast in Japanese(Arai et al., 1999).Fundamental frequency (F0) could be such asupplementary feature in Japanese. Kinoshita etal. (2002) and Nagano-Madsen (1992) reportedthat the perception of quantity in L1 Japanesewas affected by the F0 pattern. In theirexperiments, when there was a F0 fall within avowel, Japanese speakers tended to perceive thevowel as ‘long’. On the other hand, a vowelwith long duration was heard as ‘short’ when theonset of F0 fall was at the end of the vowel(Nagano-Madsen, 1992).These results are in line with phonologicaland phonetic characteristics of word accent inJapanese. It is the first mora that can be accentedin a long vowel, and the F0 fall is timed with theboundary of the accented and the post-accentmorae of the vowel. Since the second mora in along vowel does not receive the word accent, aF0 fall should not occur at the end of a longvowel.In Swedish, quantity and word accent seemonly to be indirectly related to the stress in sucha way that the stress is signaled by quantity andthe F0 contour of word accent is timed with thestress. In the current research, it is also examinedif Swedish learners react differently tostimuli with and without F0 change. Responseto unaccented and accented words will becompared. An unaccented word in Japanesetypically has only a gradual F0 declination,while an accented word is characterized by aclear F0 fall. It can be anticipated that Swedishlearners would perform differently from nativeJapanese speakers.MethodologyAn identification task was conducted in order toexamine the categorical boundary between longand short vowels and consonants and the consistencyof the categorization. The task wascarried out in a form of forced-choice test, andthe results were compared between Swedish andJapanese informants.StimuliThe measured data of the prepared stimuli 1 areshown in Table 1 and112