英語母語話者と日本人英語学習者における超分節音の生成と知覚

概要

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This study investigates the production and the perception of suprasegmental phones by native speakers of English and Japanese university students. In Experiment 1, various types of sentences pronounced by native speakers (NS), non-English major Japanese (NEM), and English major Japanese (EM) were analysed acoustically: Duration and fundamental frequency (F0) were computed and contrasted across the three groups. For all sentences excepting for declarative sentences, NEM produced utterances with fairly a longer duration than the other groups. Differences between NS and EM were small. As for F0 range, the two Japanese groups had smaller values than the native speakers, particularly in cleft, imperative, and exclamatory sentences. In Experiment 2, English naturalness was judged by using synthesized speech in two perception tests. The first test examined rhythmic patterns of a complex sentence in which the durations of stressed vowels were varied. The second test investigated intonation patterns of an interrogative sentence in which sentence-final F0 was varied. In both tests the native English listeners were more sensitive in perceiving vowel length and F0 range than the Japanese listeners. These results suggest that more emphasis on prosody is necessary in the study of English for Japanese learners of English.
外国語教育メディア学会の論文