A Study of English Prosody Produced by Native Speakers of Japanese in Consideration of Communicative Ability

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study examined the prosodic features of English produced by native speakers of Japanese, analyzing the ratings of the intelligibility levels of Japanese English productions by native speakers of English and the acoustic data of English and Japanese speakers’ productions. The prosodic characteristics varied across the length of sentences, the position of the focus in a sentence, the kind of tone, and the kind of focus. The present study revealed some difficulties that Japanese learners have in producing intelligible intonation including chunking, and also provided some useful suggestions for the teaching of English intonation to Japanese learners.