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Chapter 8 - Effects of the Postvocalic Nasal on the Perception of American English Vowels by Native Speakers of American English and Japanese

from Part II - Segmental Acquisition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

By
Takeshi Nozawa  and
Ratree Wayland
Edited by
Ratree Wayland
Ratree Wayland
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Summary

Vowels are said to be less distinctive in prenasal context. The “pin/pen” merger in the Southern United States is a good example. This study attempts to investigate the effects of the postvocalic nasal on the identification and discrimination of American English vowels by native speakers of American English (NE) and Japanese (NJ). These two groups of participants identified six American English (AE) monophthongs /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ʌ/ and discriminated six vowel pairs /i/-/ɪ/, /ɛ/-/ɪ/, /æ/-/ɛ/, /æ/-/ɑ/, /æ/-/ʌ /, and /ɑ/-/ʌ / in prenasal context. NJ also identified these American English vowels in terms of Japanese vowel categories. The results revealed that, overall, NE outperformed NJ in both identification and discrimination. In addition, how AE vowels were perceptually mapped to Japanese vowels predicted NJ’s discrimination. However, both groups’ performances were found to be poorer in the prenasal context when compared to their previous performances in the preplosive context (Nozawa & Wayland 2012), and NJ were more adversely (but differently) affected by nasalization than NE.

Keywords

JapaneseEnglishAdultsVowelPerceptionNasalStopsPerceptionMapping
Type
Chapter
Information
Second Language Speech Learning
Theoretical and Empirical Progress
 , pp. 228 - 246
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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