Study of Articulatory Interaction between Native and Non-native phonemes by use of EPG and Acoustic analysis

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Palato-lingual contact pattems were analyzed for Japanese phonemes, non-native English/r/, and /l/ uttered by native Japanese speakers. Mutual similarities between the palatolingual contact patterns for the phonemes were analyzed using a phoneme map generated by a multi-dimensional scaling(MDS), and variation speed in the contact patterns was compared. Audiovisual training in non-native speech discrimination was conducted on native Japanese adults using audiovisual recordings of native English speakers articulating 90 rl word pairs, and analysis of changes in articulatory, acoustical, perception and cortical representations of native and non-native phonetic contrasts was performed. Utterances of English /r/ and /l/ recorded from two excellent speakers of English dearly separated from each other on the map. Utterances of English /l/ positioned doser to those of Japanese /r/ than those of English/r/. The variation speed in the contact pattems was also closer to that of Japanese /r/ than English /r/ for the excellent speakers of English. These results indicated that perceptual categorization of articulatory movements and resulting phonetic sounds is listenerdependent in a language-specific way, but categorization can be plastically modified even in adulthood through training.Based on these findings, the usefulness of acoustic approaches for proper assessment of communicative values of articulations of disordered is discussed. These results suggested that articulatory analyses of palatolimgual contact patterns provide useful information on the language acquisition.