Articulatory movement in non-native consonant clusters

We investigated articulatory movements of native Japanese speakers’ productions of non-native consonant clusters, using the WAVE system (NDI Corp.). Four Japanese male speakers pronounced “blat”, “bnat”, “btat”, and “pnat” 10 times each in a carrier sentence. Tongue tip displacement from the first to the second consonant varied greatly among the speakers. An ANOVA with two factors, Speaker and Cluster, was performed, and showed significant main effects of both Speakers (p<0.0001) and Clusters (p<0.0001), and significant interaction (p<0.0001). In addition, comparison with previous data of English speakers indicated that the tongue tip displacement in Japanese speakers was larger than that for English speakers. We suggest that the large displacement from the first to second consonant for Japanese speakers indicates that coarticulation is more difficult for them than it is for English speakers.