Non-native Speakers Of Japanese Research Articles

A computer-assisted tool for automatically measuring non-native Japanese oral proficiency

This study presents the development of an automated tool for assessing the speech of non-native Japanese speakers. The tool integrated an accent-trained automatic speech recording system based on deep neural networks, audio-text transcription, and natural language processing technologies to perform annotation, analysis, calculation, and scoring. A dataset consisting of audio recordings from 1000 Japanese learners across 16 countries was used for machine training. Validity and reliability tests were parallelly developed to evaluate: (a) the measures’ ability to distinguish test takers with different oral proficiency levels; (b) the agreement between the annotations and scoring performed by the tool and human raters. The results, obtained through precision, recall, F-Score, quadratically-weighted kappa, proportional reduction of mean squared error, Pearson correlation, and multi-faceted Rasch measurement, demonstrated a relatively high reliability of the automated tool. The tool provides users with both a holistic score and individual scores for each criterion, allowing them to gain insights into their overall performance as well as detailed evaluations for each aspect of their proficiency. Consequently, it can be utilized for employment, education, and self-learning purposes.

Relationship between Illness Perception and the need for Professional Medical Interpretation for International Patients in Japan.

This study aimed to conduct a cross-sectional questionnaire survey of foreign patients to analyze the impact of patients' illness perceptions on their need for professional medical interpreters. From February 2022 to May 2023, an online questionnaire was distributed to 4,962 individuals aged 18 years or older who were non-native speakers of Japanese. These individuals were enrolled in organizations such as international exchange associations and Japanese language support classes and had utilized medical institutions in Japan due to their own illness or injury or that of their children. Among the 312 valid responses, international patients with a high score for illness perception were more likely to want to utilize professional medical interpreters than those with a low score for illness perception (odds ratio, 1.968; 95% confidence interval, 1.044-3.709; P = 0.036). Our findings suggest that hospitals should be better prepared to meet the potential language needs of international patients with a higher illness perception.

Visual-auditory perception of prosodic focus in Japanese by native and non-native speakers.

Speech communication is multi-sensory in nature. Seeing a speaker's head and face movements may significantly influence the listeners' speech processing, especially when the auditory information is not clear enough. However, research on the visual-auditory integration speech processing has left prosodic perception less well investigated than segmental perception. Furthermore, while native Japanese speakers tend to use less visual cues in segmental perception than in other western languages, to what extent the visual cues are used in Japanese focus perception by the native and non-native listeners remains unknown. To fill in these gaps, we test focus perception in Japanese among native Japanese speakers and Cantonese speakers who learn Japanese, using auditory-only and auditory-visual sentences as stimuli. Thirty native Tokyo Japanese speakers and thirty Cantonese-speaking Japanese learners who had passed the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test with level N2 or N3 were asked to judge the naturalness of 28 question-answer pairs made up of broad focus eliciting questions and three-word answers carrying broad focus, or contrastive or non-contrastive narrow focus on the middle object words. Question-answer pairs were presented in two sensory modalities, auditory-only and visual-auditory modalities in two separate experimental sessions. Both the Japanese and Cantonese groups showed weak integration of visual cues in the judgement of naturalness. Visual-auditory modality only significantly influenced Japanese participants' perception when the questions and answers were mismatched, but when the answers carried non-contrastive narrow focus, the visual cues impeded rather than facilitated their judgement. Also, the influences of specific visual cues like the displacement of eyebrows or head movements of both Japanese and Cantonese participants' responses were only significant when the questions and answers were mismatched. While Japanese participants consistently relied on the left eyebrow for focus perception, the Cantonese participants referred to head movements more often. The lack of visual-auditory integration in Japanese speaking population found in segmental perception also exist in prosodic perception of focus. Not much foreign language effects has been found among the Cantonese-speaking learners either, suggesting a limited use of facial expressions in focus marking by native and non-native Japanese speakers. Overall, the present findings indicate that the integration of visual cues in perception of focus may be specific to languages rather than universal, adding to our understanding of multisensory speech perception.

Foreword

Education is a medium of subject-matter instruction that has shown a constant evolution. In a second or “foreign” language field, it boasts close to countless combinations of a target and source language or dialect and characteristics of each individual who participates in the process, as well as all direct and indirect learning material adding to this abundance. Though having narrowed the scope of the winter ALA issue to no more than two languages, namely Japanese and Chinese in focus, a great variety of the articles nevertheless demonstrate a great variety of perceived problems and methodological approaches used to solve them. What is more, this issue also contains reviews of two new publications, yet another tool for the more advanced acquisition of the Japanese and Chinese languages respectively. We hereby express our gratitude to every single contributor to this issue, not leaving out the reviewers and others involved in the publication. This issue opens with the article “The Role of Prototypical Transitivity in the Selection of Accusative Case Particle wo by Persian Learners of L2 Japanese” written by Anubhuti CHAUHAN and Ayat HOSSEINI. In the article, the authors focused on the selection pattern of the Japanese case particle wo by Persian-speaking learners to find out that learners were, in a specific way, sensitive to the degree of predicate transitivity and that learners’ particle selection strategy is influenced by proficiency level. The article “Understanding Vocabulary of L2 Learners of Japanese” by Nagisa MORITOKI ŠKOF investigated the effectiveness of reading skills by L2 learners of Japanese from the “Reading corpus of non-native speakers of Japanese” and concluded on the types of strategies non-kanji native speakers use to grasp the meanings of individual words, sentences, or whole texts. CHEW Fong Peng wrote the article “Relationship Between Attitude, Learning Orientation, Motivation, and Proficiency Degree of the Chinese Language Among Trainee Teachers”, in which she briefly introduced the consolidating position of the Chinese language in Malaysia, and looked into motivational intensity and its incentives among Malaysian trainee teachers of the Chinese language. The following article “Mitigation Strategies in Semi-structured Oral Chinese Interviews”, written by Maria QUEROL-BATALLER conducted research on the communicative style in Chinese. By using semi-structured oral interviews from the C-ORAL-CHINA corpus she identified and accounted for the strategic mechanisms through which mitigation is carried out by native Chinese speakers. Yet another article with an inviting topic “Harry Potter Movies and Borrowing Neologisms in Chinese” was written by Michaela FRYDRYCHOVÁ. The article is a lexicological analysis of the neologisms that occurred in Harry Potter films and in it, the author defined loanword categories that were used for borrowing neologisms from English to Chinese, and assessed their productivity. Last but not least are the two book reviews. First, Chikako SHIGEMORI BUČAR reviewed the dictionary “Großes japanisch-deutsches Wörterbuch” by Stalph J. et al. (2022), in her words a remarkable achievement as, besides offering word searches, it is an excellent reference for researchers and students on Japan. In the second book review, Mateja PETROVČIČ evaluated a book entitled “Praktická korpusová lingvistika – čínsky jazyk” written by Ľuboša Gajdoša and published in 2022. The book was described as a systematic step-by-step guide to understanding the Chinese language and is recommended for readers with prior knowledge of Chinese, as well as for beginners and intermediate users in the field of corpus linguistics. Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration, and a rise of new research ideas inspired by these papers. Editors

Understanding Vocabulary of L2 Learners of Japanese

The analysis of this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of reading skills manifested by L2 learners of Japanese. In order to analyze the reading process of L2 learners of Japanese, we analyzed the data of 24 non-kanji learners of Japanese that were obtained from the “Reading corpus of non-native speakers of Japanese.” Using Yang's (2006) categorization, we analyzed learners’ understanding of words in the text through two different situations, (1) when they lack the relevant language skills, and (2) when they encounter unknown words while reading a text. The results show that learners use various tools, depending on the purpose, to find appropriate meanings of individual words and to understand the meanings of whole sentences and texts. Also, the results suggest that appropriate language knowledge prevents incorrect assumptions in comprehension and supports successful comprehension of whole texts.

"Language Choice in a Multicultural Community: A Japan Share House Case Study"

Young Japanese urbanites who prefer integrated school/work/social lives often turn to share houses to meet their needs for higher-quality housing, social life outside of work, and a better living environment. With Japan’s foreign population increasing yearly, share house set-ups geared towards international culture exchange have been increasingly popular, especially among young people. This kind of housing set-up that promotes multilingualism and multiculturalism piqued the interest of the researcher which brought this case study to analyze the domains of language use and choice of multilingual native Japanese living at a share house in Chiba, Japan. The case study also focused on the participants’ language acquisition and maintenance. Findings reveal that Japanese is used for most of the participants’ daily communication, while English is used as a universal language when communicating with non-native Japanese speakers. Some participants speak dialects that they use to communicate with their families, and some even speak a third, fourth, and fifth language which they use for work and travel abroad. Lastly, the participants were found to have acquired their mother tongue at home while their L2 to L5 was acquired from school and reinforced through their external environment.

Application of Metapragmatics to Language-Learning Research: A Longitudinal Study of Word Learning in Language Exchange Conversations

Second language acquisition (SLA) studies have not proposed a comprehensive theoretical and epistemological framework to capture both the object-level social interactions in which language learning occurs and meta-level practices of research describing it. Therefore, this study introduces the linguistic anthropological theory of “metapragmatics” into SLA research and demonstrates how it can manage both meta-level and object-level of social practices regarding language learning, with the primary focus on the latter. After considering SLA research in terms of the metapragmatic practice articulated by specific sociocultural perspectives, this study analyzes word learning during four months of language exchange conversations between two native and two non-native Japanese speakers. The results indicate that the state in which “someone has learned something” is indexically created through the metapragmatics of interaction, that is, by fading metapragmatic frames that focus on learning objects and related acts, highlighting the nonlinear, dynamic, indexical, and contextual aspects of language learning. This study concludes that the concept of metapragmatics can open new lines of SLA research to enhance the understanding of the social nature of learning and its research.

Learning Japanese Onomatopoeia through a Narrative-Evaluation E-Learning System

In Japanese, onomatopoeia are an important element in expressing feelings and experiences. They are difficult for students of Japanese to acquire, especially the nuances. Herein, we propose an e-learning system to improve the efficiency of teaching the nuances – both explicit and tacit – to non-native speakers of Japanese in three steps. We synthesized a new learning strategy available to students leaning Japanese onomatopoeia using narrative strategies to mimic the learning methods used by native speakers. This was achieved by firstly teaching the formal rules representing the explicit nuances. Secondly, the students created new onomatopoeic words by utilizing those formal rules. Finally, feedback was provided by evaluating the onomatopoeias created through the support system of narrative strategies to provide implicit teaching. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the learning system, we conducted an experiment involving two groups of subjects. While Group A got feedback about the appropriateness of their onomatopoeic constructions from the native speakers’ narrative interpretations, Group B just reviewed the database material like in a traditional classroom. Results indicate our e-learning system has a significant effect on the acquisition of a working understanding of onomatopoeia.

How to Read Uncommon Names in Present-Day Japan: A Guide for Non-Native Japanese Speakers

A previous study categorized uncommon names in present-day Japan. However, it was presented in Japanese mainly for native Japanese speakers and thus failed to explain shared knowledge about naming practices, making it difficult for non-native Japanese speakers to understand the study. It is important to share cultural practices not only within but also beyond the culture. Moreover, considering that Japanese names are difficult to read, reducing the risk of failing to read names correctly is helpful especially for non-native Japanese speakers. Therefore, by adding supplementary explanations, this paper systematically describes the characteristics and patterns of uncommon names in present-day Japan. Uncommon names largely take two forms: names with an uncommon reading of Chinese characters and names with uncommon Chinese characters. Regarding the reading, there are three types: 1-1) names that abbreviate the common reading of Chinese characters, 1-2) names that are pronounced as a foreign word, and 1-3) names that are pronounced based on the meaning/image of Chinese characters. Regarding the writing, there are two types: 2-1) names with Chinese characters used infrequently and 2-2) names with silent Chinese characters adding to the semantic meaning without contributing to the pronunciation. Further, a combination of these methods makes names more unique.

Learners’ use of the adverb yoku: degree and frequency

This study investiagted the use of the adverb yoku to modify a verb and proposed a teaching guide for its use and meaning, using unnatural examples from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I JAS). The I JAS was created using spoken language collected from native and non-native Japanese speakers’ talking tasks. Based on previous studies’ analyses of yoku, we classified the adverb yoku examples into those connoting degree, frequency, and meaning. When we compared Korean learners’ usages with those of native Japanese speakers, we found that examples of degree were used in sentences expressing an essence (e.g., well) or comparing actions (e.g., better), and examples of frequency were used in sentences referring to accidental occurrences (e.g., much, often). Unnatural examples involving yoku were used to connote degree in sentences that referred to accidental occurrences and not single actions. Unnatural examples involving yoku were also used to connote frequency in sentences with negative predicates. Korean learners used 23 different instances with different meanings such as “many” and “easily.” In addition to these findings, this study suggests some effective ways to teach students about using the adverb yoku.

Nursing student’s skills and knowledge of communicating medical information to non-native Japanese speakers: A preliminary survey and a trial intervention

Nursing student’s skills and knowledge of communicating medical information to non-native Japanese speakers: A preliminary survey and a trial intervention

Acquisition of L2 Japanese WH questions: Evidence of phonological contiguity and non-shallow structures

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain in situ by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence production task, we look to see whether non-native speakers of Japanese who are learning the L2 in university classes in North America are able to acquire grammars which are constrained by such universal properties as Match Theory and Contiguity Theory. While linear mixed effects analyses of the pitch contours reveal that the L2ers have not acquired the phonetic implementation distinction of the documented pitch boost on WH words compared to non-WH DPs, our data show that the participants have acquired the pitch compression patterns indicative of having no prosodic phrases intervening between the WH word and the question particle. This property of Japanese WH questions is not taught in their classes, and, thus we argue, that the data are supportive of the position that interlanguage grammars are constrained by universal grammatical properties such as the prosodic contiguity of WH-phrase licensing. We also present these results as being counter to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis.

DEVELOPING METHOD OF TEACHING ‘INFORMATION LITERACY IN TIMES OF DISASTER’ IN JAPANESE LANGUAGE TEACHING

This paper discusses the need for education in ‘Information Literacy in Times of Disaster’ in Japanese language education for non-native speakers of Japanese who are staying in Japan. ‘Information Literacy in Times of Disaster’ refers to the ability to obtain necessary information and transmit it as appropriate in the circumstances when a major natural disaster occurs, such as an earthquake. After the April 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, the author investigated the behavior of international students when the earthquake occurred, the criteria for their decisions, their means of collecting information and other matters. The results revealed the issue that international students’ behavior frequently relied on others’ words and they could not make decisionsindependently. The factors causing these issues include: (1) lack of knowledge and understanding of Japanese language and Japanese society; (2) psychological distance from information in Japanese; and (3) capacity to analyze information. This report proposes the development of methods of teaching ‘Information Literacy in Times of Disaster’ to resolve these issues and discusses how the development of these teaching methods will contribute to furthering information literacy education in Japanese languageeducation.

「日本語母語話者が非母語話者の言葉を置き換える」ということ : 第二言語習得研究における「言い直し」の再考( 言語・コミュニケーションの学習・教育と社会言語科学-人間・文化・社会をキーワードとして-)

「日本語母語話者が非母語話者の言葉を置き換える」ということ : 第二言語習得研究における「言い直し」の再考( 言語・コミュニケーションの学習・教育と社会言語科学-人間・文化・社会をキーワードとして-)

Japanese singleton and geminate stops mispronounced by non-native speakers

Non-native Japanese speakers often mispronounce Japanese singleton and geminate stops. However, it has been unclear how durations of speech segments in their mispronunciation differ from those of correct pronunciation by native Japanese speakers. This study analyzed mispronunciation of singleton and geminate stops by non-native speakers (8 English, 12 French, and 10 each of Korean, Taiwanese, Thai, and Vietnamese). Non-native speakers' mispronunciations were identified based on 10 native Japanese speakers' production boundary between singleton and geminate stops. It was revealed that when non-native speakers mispronounce a singleton stop as a geminate stop, stop closure is longer whereas its previous mora is shorter than in native speakers' correct pronunciation. Meanwhile, when non-native speakers mispronounce a geminate stop as a singleton stop, stop closure is shorter whereas its following mora is longer. These findings indicate that non-native speakers’ mispronunciations are caused not only by the dur...

Near-infrared-spectroscopic study on processing of sounds in the brain; a comparison between native and non-native speakers of Japanese

Conclusions The result suggested that mother tongue Japanese and non- mother tongue Japanese differ in their pattern of brain dominance when listening to sounds from the natural world—in particular, insect sounds. These results reveal significant support for previous findings from Tsunoda (in 1970).Objectives This study concentrates on listeners who show clear evidence of a ‘speech’ brain vs a ‘music’ brain and determines which side is most active in the processing of insect sounds, using with near-infrared spectroscopy.Methods The present study uses 2-channel Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to provide a more direct measure of left- and right-brain activity while participants listen to each of three types of sounds: Japanese speech, Western violin music, or insect sounds. Data were obtained from 33 participants who showed laterality on opposite sides for Japanese speech and Western music.Results Results showed that a majority (80%) of the MJ participants exhibited dominance for insect sounds on the side that was dominant for language, while a majority (62%) of the non-MJ participants exhibited dominance for insect sounds on the side that was dominant for music.

Orthography, Foreigners, and Fluency: Indexicality and Script Selection in Japanese Manga

Although writing conventions in Japanese influence the choice of script on most occasions, non-standard selections of orthography have been noted throughout the history of the written language. Despite this, empirical study has only provided perfunctory explanations of this phenomenon. What little inquiry exists often ignores context, and has focused almost entirely on the use of katakana. This study attempts to fix some of these issues and further the understanding of this feature of written Japanese, contextually examining and comparing variation between all the Japanese scripts. Data is taken from the speech of non-native Japanese speakers across four manga series, with the study employing the theory of indexicality to explain how an author’s non-standard selection of orthography plays a part in transmitting information to a reader.

Japanese Vowel Sound Classification Using Fuzzy Inference System

An automatic speech recognition system is one of the popular research problems. There are many research groups working in this field for different language including Japanese. Japanese vowel recognition is one of important parts in the Japanese speech recognition system. The vowel classification system with the Mamdani fuzzy inference system was developed in this research. We tested our system on the blind test data set collected from one male native Japanese speaker and four male non-native Japanese speakers. All subjects in the blind test data set were not the same subjects in the training data set. We found out that the classification rate from the training data set is 95.0 %. In the speaker-independent experiments, the classification rate from the native speaker is around 70.0 %, whereas that from the non-native speakers is around 80.5 %.

Prosodic characteristics in Japanese speech by Taiwan Mandarin speakers and native Japanese speakers

Previous studies (Ishihara et al., 2011; Sato 1995) show that prosody contributes more to native-like accents than segments do. It was also found that compared with errors in timing, errors in pitch accent in Japanese speech were more tolerable to native and non-native speakers. This suggests that non-native speakers pay less attention to pitch accent when speaking Japanese; as a result, their acquisition of correct pitch accent does not progress as their overall Japanese proficiency improves. In this study, Taiwan Mandarin speakers and native Japanese speakers produced Japanese words with different syllable structures, some containing all short syllables and others at least one long syllable. These words are 2 to 4 moras long and have nine pitch accent patterns. Each participant produced each word in isolation and in a carrier sentence. All speech data were acoustically analyzed to measure (1) the highest F0 point in accented syllables and (2) the difference in F0 between an accented syllable and adjacent unaccented syllables. The purpose of this study is to investigate common F0 patterns in pitch accents among native and non-native speakers of Japanese, and common pitch accent errors made by the non-native speakers.

The use of durational variables to characterize the rhythmic patterns of non-fluent Japanese utterance by non-native speakers

Twenty-nine durational variables were examined to clarify rhythmic characteristics in non-fluent Japanese utterances by non-native speakers. Discriminant analysis with these variables was performed on 343 Japanese words, each pronounced in a carrier sentence by six native Japanese speakers and 14 non-native Japanese speakers (7 Vietnamese with low Japanese proficiency and 7 Chinese with high Japanese proficiency). The results showed that a combination of two durational variables could discriminate Japanese speakers from Vietnamese speakers with a small error (8.7%, n = 4458), namely the percentage of vowel duration and the average of “Normalized Voice Onset Asynchrony,” which is an interval time between the onset of two successive vowels divided by the first vowel's duration. However, these two variables made a large error (39.4%, n = 4458) in the discrimination of Japanese speakers from Chinese speakers who had higher Japanese proficiency than Vietnamese speakers. These results suggest that the two variables characterize the rhythmic pattern in a non-fluent Japanese utterance by non-native speakers with low Japanese proficiency. [This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 22320081, 24652087, 25284080, and by Aichi Shukutoku University Cooperative Research Grant 2013-2014.]