Perception of tonal accent by americans learning Japanese

Perception of lexical pitch-accent by Korean Learners of Japanese

Tokyo Japanese has a lexical pitch-accent system whereas Seoul Korean features no wordlevel tonal representations. The present study investigated phonological perception of lexical pitch-accent by advanced Seoul Korean learners of Japanese, via sequence-recall experiments. The results, on the contrary to our prediction, showed that advanced Korean learners performed as well as native Japanese s...

The perception of non-native lexical pitch accent by speakers of ‘accentless’ Japanese dialects

While Standard (Tokyo) Japanese has a lexical tonal system known as a system of ‘lexical pitch accent’, there are some varieties of Japanese, called ‘accentless’ dialects, which do not have any lexical tonal phenomena. We investigated how the speakers of those dialects perceive Standard Japanese accent, which is nonexistent in their native dialect’s phonology. The results of the Sequence Recall...

Preliminary Analysis of Japanese Pitch Accent through Perception of Native Speakers of Tonal Language

Tonal Errors of Japanese Students Learning Chinese: A Study of Disyllabic Words

To foreigners, how to manage tone is the greatest challenge in learning Chinese. What causes foreign students to be unable to distinguish different tones is the phonological system of their native language. The accent in standard Japanese (Tokyo dialect) is distributed in the pitch change within each syllable, and the first syllable must be the opposite of the second in accent. The discrepancy ...

Japanese loanword accentuation: epenthesis and foot form interacting through edge-interior alignment

Japanese words are either accented (HL tonal melody: H | a m L | e ‘rain’ ) or unaccented (H tonal melody: a m H | e ‘candy’). Whereas the locus of accent (i.e. mora that bears H tone before a L tone, represented henceforth by acute accent) is lexically determined in native and Sino-Japanese nouns (e.g. híru ‘leech’; hirú ‘noon’), in loanwords it is predictable enough to suggest a grammatical e...