Dissertation Information
| Title: | The Acquisition of Japanese Lexical Accent by English Speakers | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Becky Taylor | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Homepage: | http://www.york.ac.uk/language/staff/academic-research/becky-taylor/ | |
| Degree Awarded: | Nagoya University , Graduate School of Languages and Cultures | |
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Completed in:
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2012 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Phonology Psycholinguistics Language Acquisition | |
| Subject Language(s): |
English
Japanese |
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| Director(s): |
Tanomu Kashima
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| Abstract: |
How do English learners of Japanese learn lexical pitch accent? This thesis
investigates to what extent accent type is learned word by word; to what extent accent is placed by rule; and how accent production varies both with experience and from learner to learner. A study was carried out in which two groups of English learners of Japanese, differing in amount of Japanese experience, read aloud Japanese words, and the accent types produced were identified by phonetically trained native speakers of Japanese. The effect of Standard Japanese (SJ) accent type, mora number, lexical class and speech environment were analysed. The results show that, regardless of Japanese experience, which accent type a word is produced with is not greatly influenced by its Standard Japanese (SJ) accent type. Neither, for the words in this study which contain only light syllables, can the accent types produced by either group of learners be predicted with any confidence from a word's mora number, lexical class or speech environment. However, each individual learner’s accent production shows some systematicity, with the details of the relation between accent type and word type and/or speech environment, and what is acquired from SJ, both individual to the learner. These results are interpreted to mean that English learners of Japanese have difficulty in encoding SJ lexical accent in their phonological representations, perhaps due to a difficulty in recognising pitch as a lexical property. The large individual differences may be a consequence of each learner's attempt, in the absence of a phonological representation for SJ lexical accent, to predict accent placement from the largely non-predictable accentual system of SJ. Most importantly, this thesis shows that having English as a common L1 does not lead to similar trends in lexical accent production in L2 Japanese. Further research could explore the nature of the phonological representation; the effect of the L1; and why no effect of experience was observed. |
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