音声的個性の Sound Recognition への影響について
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概要
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It is very often observed that Japanese learners of English have great difficulty in acquiring the recgnition ability of certain English phonemic contrasts shown by a contrastive study of the sound structures of English and Japanese. A close examination of this tendency, however, reveals that the degree of the difficulty is different among those examiners who are speakers of the same dialect and read the test materials similarly in the natural style. The present study has the purpose of drawing a clear picture of the nature of this kind of difference with three Americans as naitve informants and with fifty-five Japanese college freshmen as examinees. Test materials for this purpose were based on the Test of Aural Perception in English for Japanese Students prepared by R. Lado and R. D. Andrade, but with many alterations both on test items and on listener's responses. As a communication equipment for these series of tests the language laboratory was used, whose limits in the system frequency response were minutely examined in relation to the acoustic characteristics of each of the target sounds. The data obtained from the experiment were closely compared with the writer's auditory impressions of the speakers' taped voices, which leads to the following conclusion. Aural perception of phonemic contrasts is to discriminate an allophone of one phoneme from an allophone belonging to the other phoneme in the same phonetic environment. Each allophone has its own prominence associated with such factors as quality, length, stress and pitch. In the first two factors conditioned by the context or the situation, there are likely to be slight variations pertaining to the speaker's speech habits. Moreover, in the stream of speech, these factors are strongly affected by the prosodic features having more personal nuance. Thus phonetically the degree of prominence of the same allophone is rather different among speakers when spoken under the same conditions. Once two allophones are put in contrast as recognition items, the difference of this sort tends to become quite marked. These allophonic variations of the speaker may cause little trouble to the native listeners of the same language, but they come to exert a more powerful influence on Japanese learners whose common core with the speaker in speech communication is still smaller in their present stage, with varying degrees of its influence in accordance with vowels, consonants and pair words, pair sentences. As for vowels, far greater than consonants in power, the influence of allophonic variations of the speaker, if in pair words, is not great enough to give any trouble in recognizing the contrasts; while in pair sentences, the quality and the length, the most significant cue for the vowel recognition, colored in different tints by the prosodic features, diversify the students' ability in discriminating the same vowel contrasts. On the other hand, the recognition of consonant contrasts is subject to be affected by any kind of small energy both in pair words and in pair sentences, so that the consonant recognition is not only far more difficult than the vowel recognition, but also suffers from the strong influence of phonetic variants of the speaker, showing wide variations among the recognition data by different speakers. But the degree of this difference varies according to pair words and pair sentences : the difference in the latter is perceived to be less great than that in the former.
- 湘南工科大学の論文
- 1968-03-31