Perception of Japanese mora nasal /N/ and mora obstruent /Q/ by native Japanese, English, and Thai speakers.

Abstract

Japanese mora nasal /N/ and more obstruent /Q/ are produced at different places of articulation, being homorganic with the following consonant. Four native speakers of Japanese produced /N/ and /Q/ in /CVNCV/ and /CVQCV/ contexts, where the consonant after /N/ and /Q/ is always a stop. Their utterances were recorded and digitized. The word final /CV/ was edited out, and the stimuli with the structure of /CVN/ and /CVQ/ were created. Twelve native speakers of Japanese, American English, and Thai were recruited as listeners. The listeners were told to identify the syllable‐final nasal (/m/, /n/ or /ŋ/, and the missing stop (/p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, or /g/). Generally, the Thai listeners outperformed the other two groups of listeners, and the Japanese listeners performed most poorly. The Thai listeners good performance may be partly explained by the fact that in Thai postvocalic stops are normally unreleased, and the Thai listeners were less dependent on the release burst to identify the place of articulation of a postvocalic stop. The Thai listeners tended to identify voiced stops as voiceless stops of the same place of articulation. This may be because voiced stops cannot occur postvocalically in Thai.