日本人英語学習者によるアメリカ英語母音の知覚について

概要

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The present study examined Japanese learners' ability to perceive American English vowels, adopting the multiple-choice identification test used in Yamada et al. (1998). Subjects were asked to identify the word which they heard with one among the minimal sets such as [hid / head / had, etc.], where the vowels formed the contrasts. More phonological contexts than Yamada et al. had used were employed in this study and the relevance of subjects' lexical familiarity with the target words to the test was also examined. The result showed that subjects' lexical knowledge had not affected their performance and long vowels and diphthongs such as [i:], [eI] and [aI] were easy to perceive whereas [〓:]-[o〓] contrast, [〓]-[Λ]-[α] contrasts and [I] and [〓] vowels were rather difficult to perceive for Japanese learners. The difference in the perceptual ability between Japanese students who had never studied abroad and those who had studied in England for about one year was also examined.