Realisation of the Prosodic Structure of Spoken Telephone Numbers by Native and Non-native Speakers of Japanese

This paper reports the different realisations of the prosodic structure of Japanese telephone numbers in native and non-native Japanese speech. In Japanese, spoken telephone numbers have a structured prosody called bipodic template; and their accentuation is determined to occur every two digits. Pitch contours of the spoken telephone numbers were analysed and compared among speakers of Japanese natives and Chinese and Korean learners of Japanese. The results revealed that only the native speakers followed the bipodic template structure, and non-natives showed different prosodic structures depending on their first languages. We further analysed the differences of the F0 patterns between native and non-native speakers by using cosine similarity measure. Japanese speakers’ utterances had very similar F0 contours to typical Japanese, whereas those of nonnatives showed less similarity and larger variance.