Comprehension of English Loanwords in Japanese by Japanese and English Speakers

English loanwords in Japanese

As a result of the economic, political and cultural influence of Britain and the US, and the emergence of English as an international language, many world languages have absorbed loanwords from English, especially during the twentieth century. Japanese contains thousands of such borrowings, many of which are well-established and in universal use. A domestic phonetic script is available to both ...

Vowel epenthesis in Japanese speakers' L2 English

This study investigated how vowel epenthesis, a typical suprasegmental error produced by Japanese learners of English, is realized in their speech production of L2 English. We investigated two aspects: (i) whether loanword epenthesis phonology in Japanese transfers to English speech production, and (ii) how learners’ English proficiency level affects vowel epenthesis. In Japanese loanword phono...

Shoji and Shoji Vowel Epenthesis and Consonant Deletion in Japanese Loanwords from English Vowel Epenthesis and Consonant Deletion in Japanese Loanwords from English

Developmental change in English stress manifestation by Japanese speakers

This study investigated the developmental change in the phonetic realization of English stress, using corpus data of Japanese English learners with varying proficiency. Previous studies demonstrated that highly proficient Japanese learners of English can produce native-like English lexical stress in terms of intensity, F0, and vowel duration, but not vowel quality. The results of our study show...

Intelligibility of English Phonemes Spoken by L1 Japanese Speakers

This study explored which segmental sounds of English spoken by Japanese L1 speakers were intelligible to non-native speakers of English. It also investigated the reasons for the reduced intelligibility of some of the sounds. Thus, this study addressed two research questions: RQ1 “What English phonemes spoken with a Japanese accent are intelligible enough in international settings?”, and RQ2, “...