Contextual analysis on geminate/singleton identification difficulties for L2 learners of Japanese based on perceptual features

Abstract

It is widely known that Japanese geminate/singleton consonant identification is one of the biggest problems for L2 learners. We have been analyzing identification error characteristics based on their perceptually motivated features. In this presentation, after briefly introducing observed remarkable identification error chracteristics on phonetic context differences with speech rate variations, we have tried to analyze and quantify the difficulties using identification error rates by Japanese beginners of Korean natives. 36 geminate/singleton pairs in 2-5 mora with three speech rates were used for identification experiments. To understand the difficulties quantitatively, objectively measurable acoustic variables such as duration length, loudness and its jumps of the corresponding geminate/singleton consonants were employed to carry out prediction analysis for L2’s identification error rates. Correlation between predicted error rates and observed ones has turned out to be around 0.6 with the speech rates where more identification errors existed. Through these analyses, we could have confirmed that perceptually motivated parameters could provide reasonable and effective explanation in contextual differences of identification errors by L2 learners and its quantification. These results suggest the possibility of effective L2 learning based on perceptual difficulties.