Acoustic Examination of Acquisition of Second Language Prosody and Modeling of Second Language Prosody Acquisition

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This study investigated acquisition of second language prosody between Japanese and English. In Japanese speakers' English utterances, most Japanese speakers did not reduce vowels in unstressed syllables. However, for English speakers' utterances in Japanese there was a tendency for accented vowels to be longer as well as higher pitched. English speakers also showed a clear tendency to use word accents in a phrase, which caused downstep. This phrase intonation was distinctly different from Japanese phrase intonation by native Japanese speakers ; especially when a phrase consisted of all non-accented words whose phrase intonation simply showed natural declination.