Acquisition of Rhythmic Patterns in English by Native Speakers of English and Japanese Learners

本研究的目的是探讨英语节奏对日本学习者英语感知和产生的影响。作为节奏的一个方面，我们想要研究压力相关变体的感知和产生。我们选择了一种常用的弱形式-文章-并检查了它们的感知和生产。我们比较了声学特征——前辅音的闭合时间和冠词的持续时间——对日本英语学习者和英语母语者感知英语冠词的影响。感知实验使用语音刺激进行，其中持续时间特征由语音波编辑程序操纵。我们发现，美国人和日本人在对文章的持续性特征的感知方面表现得非常不同。此外，我们发现，与母语人士相比，日本人对次要特征的依赖程度要大得多。只有当文章的主要特征没有覆盖这些次要特征时，母语人士才会依赖这些持续特征。在日语的情况下，很可能是辅音元素的感知困难导致他们过度依赖于时间特征。此外，研究还表明，每个被试群体对这些特征的产生模式与其特征感知模式有关。

The purpose of the present study was to find out how rhythm in English influences the perception and production of English by Japanese learners. As one of the aspects of rhythm, we wanted to investigatethe perception and production of stress-related variants. We selected one of the frequently-used weak forms-articles-and examined their perception and production. We compared the influence of acoustic features-the closure period of the preceding consonants and the duration of articles-on the perception of English articles for Japanese learners of English, with that of native speakers of English. Perceptual experiments were conducted using speech stimuli in which the durational characteristics were manipulated by a speech-wave editing program. We found that the Americans and the Japanese behaved very differently with respect to the perception of durational features in their perception of articles. Furthermore, we found that Japanese depend to a much greater degree on secondary features, as compared to native speakers. Native speakers depend on these durational features only when the primary feature of the article does not override these secondary features. In the case of Japanese, it is likely that the difficulty in the perception of the consonant element contributes to their excessie dependence on temporal features. Also, it was shown that the production pattern of these features by each of the subject groups is related to their characteristic perception pattern.