Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Gestural Delay and Gestural Reduction: Articulatory Variation in /l/-vocalisation in Southern British English
- 2 The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
- 3 The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English: A Case of Near-phonemes?
- 4 Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
- 5 R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
- 6 A Corpora-based Study of Vowel Reduction in Two Speech Styles: A Comparison between English and Polish
- 7 On ‘Because’: Phonological Variants and their Pragmatic Functions in a Corpus of Bolton (Lancashire) English
- 8 On the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift
- 9 The Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Northern Michigan
- 10 Levelling in a Northern English Variety: The Case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
- 11 A Study of Rhoticity in Boston: Results from a PAC Survey
- 12 A Corpus-based Study of /t/ flapping in American English Broadcast Speech
- Index
4 - Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Gestural Delay and Gestural Reduction: Articulatory Variation in /l/-vocalisation in Southern British English
- 2 The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
- 3 The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English: A Case of Near-phonemes?
- 4 Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
- 5 R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
- 6 A Corpora-based Study of Vowel Reduction in Two Speech Styles: A Comparison between English and Polish
- 7 On ‘Because’: Phonological Variants and their Pragmatic Functions in a Corpus of Bolton (Lancashire) English
- 8 On the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift
- 9 The Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Northern Michigan
- 10 Levelling in a Northern English Variety: The Case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
- 11 A Study of Rhoticity in Boston: Results from a PAC Survey
- 12 A Corpus-based Study of /t/ flapping in American English Broadcast Speech
- Index
Summary
Overview
It is well known that Japanese speakers have difficulty in differentiating the liquid consonants /l/ and /r/. This is because /l/ and /r/ are not contrastive in Japanese, and allophonic variations of both /l/ and /r/ occur in Japanese speech. The most common realisation is alveolar tap [ɾ], but [l] also occurs in natural speech. However, these variants are phonemically all recognised as /r/ in Japanese. A study of Japanese speakers’ English pronunciation errors using a large English learner corpus, J-AESOP, found that Japanese speakers produced more mistakes in /l/ than /r/. The Japanese speakers substituted /r/ for /l/ (418 examples out of 2,142 consonantal errors) much more often than they substituted /l/ for /r/ (124 examples out of 2,142 consonantal errors). Research is being conducted to examine the acquisition of English liquid consonants by Japanese speakers in relation to the concept of new phonetic categories proposed by the Speech Learning Model. Furthermore, it is important to assess how L2 learners use a new phonetic category when they face a new variant of a phoneme, produced in a different accent to that which they had already studied in the target language. Previous analysis of Japanese speakers’ mimicry speech of (a) American English and (b) English-accented Japanese suggested that Japanese speakers were aware of acoustic and articulatory features of English approximant [ɹ] (Kondo 2016). The Japanese speakers overused approximant [ɹ] and r-coloured vowels in their mimicries of both (a) and (b). Further articulatory analysis of Japanese and English consonants showed that the English approximant [ɹ] is quite distinct from Japanese consonants, all of which lack lip rounding and tongue retraction. The results of these studies suggest that Japanese speakers may not be able to recognise English /l/ and /r/ as separate phonemes, but that they can hear the approximant [ɹ] as it forms a new phonetic category, i.e. /ɹ/. In contrast, they recognise English /l/ as a sound in the same category as Japanese /r/. Based on these earlier data, the current chapter assesses the effectiveness of pronunciation training for Japanese students. We discuss the abilities of ninety trained and ninety untrained Japanese speakers to form a new phonetic category of an approximant [ɹ].
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Corpus Phonology of EnglishMultifocal Analyses of Variation, pp. 74 - 97Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020