Native and non-native perception of phonemic length contrasts in Japanese: Effects of speaking rate and presentation context

Abstract

Japanese words can be distinguished by the length of phonemes, e.g., ‘‘chizu’’ (map) versus ‘‘chiizu’’ (cheese). Perceiving these length contrasts is therefore important for learning Japanese as a second language. The present study examined native English listeners’ perception of length contrasts at different speaking rates and in different contexts. Stimuli consisted of 20 Japanese word pairs that minimally contrasted in vowel length, and 10 synthesized nonwords. The nonwords were created by modifying the duration of the second vowel of the nonword ‘‘erete’’ along a continuum (from ‘‘erete’’ to ‘‘ereete’’). Stimuli were presented with or without a carrier sentence at three rates (fast, normal, slow). Rate was either fixed or randomized trial by trial. Sixteen native English and 16 native Japanese listeners participated in a single-stimulus, two-alternative forced-choice identification task. Results suggest that native Japanese listeners’ identification boundaries systematically shifted due to changes in speaking rate when the stimuli were in the context of a sentence with mixed rates of presentation. In contrast, native English listeners show a shift in the opposite direction, suggesting that they did not follow the variation in speaking rate. These results will be discussed from the viewpoint of training second-language phoneme perception. [Work supported by JSPS.]