An analysis of prosodic and phonologic properties of English and Japanese, and pronunciation learning

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research is composed of five sections. The fast deals with the issue of how an advanced-level Japanese learner of English differs from the native speaker's oral reading performance in terms of pitch contours of sentences. The main finding involved flatter intonation patterns as measured in fundamental frequency, but also some displacements from standard pitch contours were hind. The second concerns characteristics of model oral reading, in which fundamental frequencies were measured for phonological words. An autocorrelation analysis indicated that the effect of the fundamental frequency of a given phonological word carries over to the following two phonological words. The thirds study is about nasalization. Japanese university students orally read two short English passage and three short Japanese ones. As compared to an English standard, the overall mean nasality for Japanese students was smaller, and in reading Japanese passages, Japanese students were divided into two groups in terms of the degree of nasalization. The fourth section involves oral reading performance by an adult Japanese speaker who stutters. The present researcher was informed that the person stuttered more frequently in front of people than when he was alone. We thus recorded his oral reading when he was alone and when the present research was there listening to his reading. The mean number of stuttering was obviously larger in the audience condition than in the no-audience condition. Furthermore, the mean fundamental frequency for phonological words was approximately 5 Hz higher in the former condition than in the latter condition. To demonstrate this latter finding in a more rigorous manner, the fifth study employed an A-B-A-B paradigm, where A represents an audience condition and B represents a no-audience condition. Results replicated the association between fundamental frequency and presence of audience such that the fundamental frequency becomes higher in an audience condition.