Experimental research on the speciality of Japanese in listening to speechsounds.

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This research ams at answering the question, "Why are the Japanese people bad at understanding what the native speakers say? " Several auditory and audio-visual experiments were conducted on this question. The results are listed below.1. The Japanese listeners perceived the English vowels /i/, /epsilon/, and /a/ corresponing to the Japanese vowels /i/, /e/, and /a/.2. The stimulus order effects were obtained near the typical Japanese vowels /i/, /e/, and /a/.3. The stimulus order effects were not obtained around the English vowels /I/, which is not contained in the Japanese vowel phonemic system.4. The amount of stimulus order effect was greater when typical vowel was put after the ambiguous vowel than when it was put before the ambiguous one.5. Under audi-visual presentation, the occurrence of vowel contingent effect was influenced by the vowel environment-- that is, when the consonant-vowel (CV) syllable was consisted of C-/u/, there were few vowel contingent effects, although the CV sylable was consisted of C-/i/ or C-/a/, there were great vowel contingent effects.These reslts were discussed maily based on the hypotheses of prototypes of native language, the characteristics of auditory and phonetic memory, and the integration of auditory and visual information.