Non-native Japanese learners' perception of vowel length contrasts in Arabic and Japanese

Abstract

This study examined the perception of short vs. long vowel contrasts in Arabic and Japanese by four groups of listeners differing in their linguistic backgrounds: native Arabic (NA), native Japanese (NJ), non-native Japanese (NNJ), and Australian English (OZ) speakers. Listeners' first languages differed in the extent to which vowel duration is used contrastively. In both Arabic and Japanese, vowel length is phonemic. English, on the other hand, utilizes vowel duration in a more limited way. Of interest was the discrimination accuracy of NNJ listeners who learned Japanese as a second language beyond childhood. As expected, the NA and NJ groups discriminated their native contrasts more accurately than all the other groups while the NNJ listeners showed a significant shift in their perceptual behavior and outperformed the OZ listeners who had no knowledge of Japanese in discriminating the Japanese vowel length contrasts. Furthermore, NNJ was the only group who showed a balanced pattern of discrimination acc...