The Perception of Novel Phoneme Contrasts in a Second Language: A Developmental Study of Native Speakers of English Learning Japanese Singleton and Geminate Consonant Contrasts*

This work explores development in the perception of Japanese singleton and geminate consonant contrasts among native speakers of English learning Japanese as a second language. The primary goal of this paper is to show that the second language (L2) acquisition of phoneme contrasts that are not present in the first language (L1) exhibits development that is predictable from the acoustic properties of the contrast. Additionally I attribute differences in the perception of particular singleton/geminate contrasts by both native speakers of Japanese and learners of Japanese as a result of acoustic properties of the contrasts. The organization of this paper is as follows: Section 2 provides an account of singleton and geminate consonant contrasts in English and Japanese, and introduces a model of the perception grammar of each language that accounts for the presence or absence of the contrasts. Section 3 presents a model of second language acquisition and the influence of the first language grammar on the development of the second language. In section 4 I discuss the acoustic properties of singleton/geminate contrasts. Section 5 gives the details of a second language perception experiment designed to uncover developmental stages in L2 perception of singleton/geminate contrasts. Section 6 introduces an analysis of L2 developmental stages and variation at each stage. And section 7 provides a discussion of the conclusions and directions for future research.