Speaker: Keiichi Tajima (Professor, Dept. of Psychology, Hosei University / Visiting Researcher, Speech Communication Group, Research Laboratories of Electronics, MIT)
Title: Perception of prosody in a non-native language: The case of Japanese
listeners perception of English syllable structure.
Date/Time: Monday, Nov 19, 5pm
Location: 32-D831
Learners of a second language (L2) are known to have difficulty in the
production and perception of not just phonetic contrasts that are not
found in their native language (L1), but also prosodic properties that
diverge from their L1, such as syllable structure, rhythm, and
intonation. In the present study, I report results from a series of
studies that investigated the extent to which native Japanese
listeners have difficulty perceiving syllables in spoken English,
given the fact that English generally has more complex syllable
structures than Japanese. Results show that Japanese listeners indeed
have great difficulty accurately counting syllables in spoken English
words. Perceptual identification training, however, significantly
improves their performance. The non-native listeners difficulty was
strongly related to phonological factors such as the syllable
complexity of the English words, but it was not related to phonetic
factors such as the speaking rate of the words, nor to lexical factors
such as the presence or absence of loanwords in Japanese that are
etymologically / semantically related to yet phonologically distinct
(with divergent syllable structures) from the source words, e.g.,
English source word stress and its corresponding Japanese loanword
sutoresu.