Japanese Speakers Learning R And L
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Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
has one
liquid Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usually close to th ...
phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
, realized usually as an apico-alveolar tap and sometimes as an
alveolar lateral approximant The voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral ...
. English has two: rhotic and
lateral Lateral is a geometric term of location which may also refer to: Biology and healthcare * Lateral (anatomy), a term of location meaning "towards the side" * Lateral cricoarytenoid muscle, an intrinsic muscle of the larynx * Lateral release ( ...
, with varying
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
realizations centered on the
postalveolar approximant The voiced alveolar and postalveolar approximants are types of consonantal sounds used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the alveolar and postalveolar approximants is , a lowercase lette ...
and on the alveolar lateral approximant , respectively. Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language later than childhood often have difficulty in hearing and producing the and of English accurately.


Phonetic differences

The Japanese liquid is most often realized as an
alveolar tap The voiced alveolar tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents a dental consonant, dental, alveolar consonant, alveolar, or postalveolar consonant, p ...
, though there is some variation depending on phonetic context. of American English (the dialect Japanese speakers are typically exposed to) is most commonly a postalveolar central
approximant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do prod ...
with simultaneous secondary pharyngeal constriction or less commonly a
retroflex approximant The voiced retroflex approximant is a type of consonant used in some languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r\`. The IPA symbol is a turned lowercase lett ...
. involves contact with the
alveolar ridge The alveolar process () is the portion of bone containing the tooth sockets on the jaw bones (in humans, the maxilla and the mandible). The alveolar process is covered by gums within the mouth, terminating roughly along the line of the mandib ...
as well as some raising of the tongue dorsum (velarization), especially when syllable-final.


Perception

Evidence from and suggests that Japanese speakers perceive English as somewhat like the compressed-lip velar approximant and other studies have shown speakers to hear it more as an ill-formed Japanese . reports that native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English and , even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English, have lived in an English-speaking country for extended periods, and can articulate the two sounds when speaking English. Japanese speakers can, however, perceive the difference between English and when these sounds are not mentally processed as speech sounds. found that Japanese speakers could distinguish and just as well as native English speakers if the sounds were acoustically manipulated in a way that made them sound less like speech (by removal of all acoustic information except the F3 component). found that speakers' ability to distinguish between the two sounds depended on where the sound occurred. Word-final and with a preceding vowel were distinguished the best, followed by word-initial and . Those that occurred in initial consonant clusters or between vowels were the most difficult to distinguish accurately. provide evidence that there is a link between
perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
and production to the extent that
perceptual learning Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seein ...
generally transferred to improved production. However, there may be little correlation between degrees of learning in perception and production after training in perception, due to the wide range of individual variation in learning strategies.


Production

reports that Japanese speakers who cannot hear the difference between and may still learn to produce the difference, presumably through articulatory training in which they learn the correct places and manners of articulation required for the production of the two sounds. In this sense, they learn to produce and in much the same way a deaf person would. Although they have only a single acoustic image corresponding to a single phoneme intermediary between and , they can determine they are producing the correct sound based on the tactile sensations of the speech articulators (i.e. tongue, alveolar ridge, etc.) coming into contact with each other without any auditory feedback or confirmation that they are indeed producing the sound correctly.


Variations in acquisition

There is some indication that Japanese speakers tend to improve more on the perception and production of than . conducted a longitudinal study that examined the perception and production of English , , and by adults and children who were native speakers of Japanese but living in the United States. Over time, the children improved more on English than English . Similarly, found that Japanese speakers who received training in distinguishing English sounds improved more on than on . They suggest that English is perceived as more similar to Japanese than English is, and hence it is harder for Japanese speakers to distinguish Japanese from English than Japanese from English . found differences between the second and third formants in and of a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker. The results showed that the Japanese speaker had a hard time producing an English-like third formant, especially that which is required to produce an .


Effects of training

There have been a number of experiments in training Japanese subjects to improve their perception of and . found that monolingual Japanese speakers in Japan could increase their ability to distinguish between /l/ and /r/ after a 3-week training period, which involved hearing
minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate t ...
s (such as 'rock' and 'lock') produced by five speakers, and being asked to identify which word was which. Feedback was provided during training, and participants had to listen to the minimal pairs until the correct answer was given. Participants performed significantly better immediately after the 3-week training, and retained some improvements when retested after 3 months and after 6 months (although there was a decrease in recognition ability at the 6-month test). Reaction time decreased during the training period as the accuracy went up. Participants could "generalize" their learning somewhat: when tested they could distinguish between new /l/ and /r/ minimal pairs, but performed better when the pairs were said by one of the five speakers they had heard before rather than by a new speaker. also found that subjects who were trained by listening to multiple speakers' production of and in only a few phonetic environments improved more than subjects who were trained with a single talker using a wider range of phonetic environments. argue that it is possible to train Japanese adults to distinguish speech sounds they find difficult to differentiate at first. They found that speech training results in outcomes indicating a real change in the perception of the sounds as speech, rather than simply in auditory perception. However, it is not clear whether adult learners can ever fully overcome their difficulties with and . found that even Japanese speakers who have lived 12 or more years in the United States have more trouble identifying and than native English speakers do.


Examples

There are numerous minimal pairs of words distinguishing only and . For their study, used the following ones: *''right/light'' *''red/led'' *''road/load'' *''arrive/alive'' *''correct/collect'' *''crime/climb'' *''bread/bled'' *''froze/flows'' The Japanese adaptation of English words is largely
non-rhotic The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant, , is preserved in all p ...
, in that English at the end of a syllable is realized either as a vowel or as nothing and therefore is distinguished from in the same environment. So ''store'' and ''stole'' or ''stall'', for example, are distinguished as ''sutoa'' and ''sutōru'', respectively. File:Japanese mistake in English caused by perceptions of R and L sounds at Yodobashi Camera.jpg, A sign at
Yodobashi Camera is a major Japanese retail chain specializing in electronics, PCs, cameras and photographic equipment. Yodobashi Camera's sales rank fourth among consumer electronics mass retailers in Japan, after Yamada Denki, Bic Camera, and K's Holdin ...
confuses the words "frame" and "flame". File:Japanese mistake in English caused by perceptions of R and L sounds at gift shop in Otaru.jpg, At a gift shop in
Otaru is a Cities of Japan, city and Seaports of Japan, port in Shiribeshi Subprefecture, Hokkaido, Japan, northwest of Sapporo. The city faces Ishikari Bay and the Sea of Japan, and has long served as the main port of the bay. With its many historical ...
File:Japanese mistake in English caused by perceptions of R and L sounds at a bar in Sapporo.jpg, At a bar in
Sapporo is a Cities designated by government ordinance of Japan, designated city in Hokkaido, Japan. Located in the southwest of Hokkaido, it lies within the alluvial fan of the Toyohira River, a tributary of the Ishikari River. Sapporo is the capital ...
File:Japanese mistake in English caused by perceptions of R and L sounds at bar in Sapporo 2.jpg, At an
Irish Pub In Ireland, a "pub" is an establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. Irish pubs are characterised by a unique culture centred around a casual and friendly atmosphere, hearty food and drink, Irish sports, ...
in Sapporo


See also

*
English phonology English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of Eng ...
*
Engrish ''Engrish'' is a slang term for the inaccurate, poorly translated, nonsensical or ungrammatical use of the English language by native speakers of other languages. The word itself relates to Japanese speakers learning r and l, Japanese speaker ...
* Lallation (disambiguation) *
Non-native pronunciations of English Non-native pronunciations of English result from the common linguistic phenomenon in which non-native speakers of any language tend to transfer the intonation, phonological processes and pronunciation rules of their first language into their E ...
* Rhotacism and lambdacism


References


Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * {{Refend English language Japanese language Japanese phonology Phonology Language acquisition Language comparison Rhotic consonants Shibboleths English as a second or foreign language