Longitudinal acoustic analysis of /ɹ/ among Japanese returnee children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2024/15/0031/000656Abstract
Japanese returnee children exhibit variations in their pronunciation of the English consonant /ɹ/ over a five-year period. Changes in their language environment are likely to influence early language acquisition. This study involves eight Japanese returnee children who were asked to describe the picture book "Frog, Where Are You?" The research compares the third fundamental frequency (F3) of the consonant /ɹ/ at three different times: immediately after the return, one year later, and five years later. The findings indicate that there is no positive correlation between changes in F3 and the duration of time since their return.
References
Aoyama, K., Flege, J. E., Guion, S. G., Akahane-Yamada, R., & Yamada, T. (2004). Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: The case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/. Journal of Phonetics, 32(2), 233–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0095-4470(03)00036-6
Boersma P and Weenink D (2019) Praat: doing phonetics by computer: 6.0.48 [computer program]. Available at: http://www.praat.org.
Flege, J. E., Takagi, N., & Mann, V. (1995). Japanese Adults can Learn to Produce English /I/ and /l/ Accurately. Language and Speech, 38(1), 25–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383099503800102
Flores, C. (2010). The effect of age on language attrition: Evidence from bilingual returnees. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 533–546. https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672890999054X
Iverson, P., Hazan, V., & Bannister, K. (2005). Phonetic Training with Acoustic Cue Manipulation: A Comparison of Methods for Teaching English /r/-/l/ to Japanese Adults. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118, 3267–3278. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2062307
Laméris, T. J., Kubota, M., Kupisch, T., Cabrelli, J., Snape, N., & Rothman, J. (2024). Language change in Japanese–English bilingual returnee children over the course of five years: Evidence from accent-rating. Second Language Research, 02676583241230854. https://doi.org/10.1177/02676583241230854
Shinohara, Y., & Iverson, P. (2021). The effect of age on English /r/-/l/ perceptual training outcomes for Japanese speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 89, 101108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101108
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.