Japanese speakers learning r and l

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Japanese has only one liquid consonant, a lateral flap /ɺ/, while English has an alveolar lateral approximant /l/ and an alveolar or retroflex central approximant /r/. When Japanese speakers learn English later than childhood, they typically have difficulty in hearing and producing the difference between /l/ and /r/.

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[edit] Perception

Goto (1971) reports that native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/, even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English, have lived in the U.S. for extended periods, and can articulate the two sounds when speaking English.[1]

Japanese speakers are, however, able to perceive the difference between English /r/ and /l/ when these sounds are not mentally processed as speech sounds. Miyawaki et al. (1975) found that Japanese speakers could distinguish /r/ and /l/ 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).[2]

Lively et al. (1994) found that speakers' ability to distinguish between the two sounds depended on where the sound occurred. Word-final /l/ and /r/ with a preceding vowel were distinguished the best, followed by word-initial /r/ and /l/. Those that occurred in initial consonant clusters or between vowels were the most difficult to distinguish accurately.[3]

Bradley et al. (1997) provide evidence that there is a link between perception and production to the extent that perceptual learning 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.[4]

[edit] Production

Goto (1971) reports that Japanese speakers who are unable to hear the difference between /r/ and /l/ 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 /r/ and /l/ in much the same way a deaf person would. Although they have only a single acoustic image corresponding to a single phoneme intermediary between /r/ and /l/, they are able to know 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.[1]

[edit] Variations in acquisition

There is some indication that Japanese speakers tend to improve more on the perception and production of /r/ than /l/.

Aoyama et al. (2004) conducted a longitudinal study examined the perception and production of English /l/, /r/, and /w/ by adults and children who were native speakers of Japanese but living in the US. Over time, the children improved more on English /r/ than English /l/.[5]

Similarly, Guion et al. (2000) found that Japanese speakers who received training in distinguishing English sounds improved more on /r/ than on /l/. They suggest that English /l/ is perceived as more similar to Japanese /ɺ/ than English /r/ is, and hence it is harder for Japanese speakers to distinguish /ɾ/ from /l/ than /ɺ/ from /r/.[6]

Kuzniak & Zapf (2004) found differences between the second and third formants in /r/ and /l/ 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 /l/.[7]

[edit] Effects of training

There have been a number of experiments in training Japanese subjects to improve their perception of /r/ and /l/.[8]

Lively et al. (1994) found that monolingual Japanese speakers in Japan were able to increase their ability to distinguish between /l/ and /r/ after a 3 week training period, which involved hearing minimal pairs (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 were able to "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 5 speakers they had heard before than a new speaker.[3]

Lively, Logan & Pisoni (1993) also found that subjects who were trained by listening to multiple speakers' production of /r/ and /l/ in only a few phonetic environments improved more than subjects who were trained with a single talker using wider range of phonetic environments.[9]

McClelland, Fiez & McCandliss (2002) argue that it's possible to train Japanese adults to distinguish speech sounds they found 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.[10]

However, it is not clear whether adult learners can ever fully overcome their difficulties with /r/ and /l/. Tagaki & Mann (1995) found that even Japanese speakers who have lived 12 or more years in the US have more trouble identifying /r/ and /l/ than native English speakers do.[11]

[edit] Examples

There are numerous minimal pairs of words distinguishing only /r/ and /l/. For their study, Kuzniak & Zapf (2004) used:

Right/light
Red/Led
Load/Road
Climb/Crime
Bled/Bread
Flows/Froze
Alive/Arrive
Collect/Correct
File/Fire
Mole/More

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Goto, Hiromu (1971), "Auditory perception by normal Japanese adults of the sounds "l" and "r""", Neuropsychologia 9: 317-323
  2. ^ Miyawaki, Miyawaki; W. Strange & R.R. Verbrugge et al. (1975), "An effect of linguistic experience: the discrimination of [r] and [l] by native speakers of Japanese and English", Perception and Psychophysics 18 (5): 331-340
  3. ^ a b Lively, S.E.; D.B. Pisoni & R.A. Yamada, et al. (1994), "Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: III. Long-term retention of new phonetic categories.", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 96 (4): 2076–2087
  4. ^ Bradlow, A.; D Pisoni & R.A. Yamada et al. (1997), "Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101 pages=2299-2310
  5. ^ Aoyama, Katsura; James Emil Flege & Susan Guion et al. (2004), "Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: the case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/", Journal of Phonetics 32: 233–250
  6. ^ Guion, Susan; James Emil Flege & Reiko Akahane-Yamada et al. (2000), "An investigation of current models of second language speech perception: The case of Japanese adults’ perception of English consonants", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 107 (5 Pt. 1): 2711-2724
  7. ^ Kuzniak, Kinnaird & Jennifer Zapf (2004), An acoustical analysis of a Japanese speaker's production of English /r/ and /l/
  8. ^ Logan, J.D.; Susan =Lively & D Pisoni (1991), "Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: a first report", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 89: 874–886
  9. ^ Lively, Susan; J.D. Logan & D Pisoni (1993), "Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: II. The role of phonetic environment and talker variability in new perceptual categories", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 94: 1242-1255
  10. ^ McClelland, J.L. & B.D. McCandliss, Teaching the /r/-/l/ Discrimination to Japanese Adults: Behavioral and Neural Aspects, vol. 77, 657-662
  11. ^ Tagaki, Naoyuki & Virginia Mann (1995), "The limits of extended naturalistic exposure on the perceptual mastery of English /r/ and /l/ by adult Japanese learners of English", Applied Psycholinguistics 16 (4): 379-405

[edit] See also