Desuga ですが and the Spread of Voicing Feature in L2 Japanese

Abstract

It has been observed that Slovene students of Japanese tend to pronounce formal verb suffix ~ます ~masu or formal copula です desu followed by a conjunctive particle が ga as […mazga…] and […dezga…]. Present acoustic experiment confirms these perceptional observations. The author discusses phonological processes of Japanese and Slovene, and discusses possible reasons for the mispronunciations. She finds out that similarities in the surface phonetic form of the above expressions first introduced cause students to misinterpret Japanese vowel devoicing as vowel elision, the process which is familiar to them from L1. Consequently, any further conclusions built on such thinking would lead to further mispronunciations.