Rating nonnativeness in L1-Japanese L2-Arabic Speakers’ Vowels
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0003/000476Keywords:
duration, accentedness detection, nonnativeness rating, Japanese, ArabicAbstract
This experiment investigates whether Arabic native speakers can detect nonnativeness (i.e., accentedness) in similar L1-Japanese L2-Arabic short and long vowels. We asked two native speakers of Arabic and two Japanese learners of Arabic as a foreign language to record 48 Arabic CVCVC vs. CVCVːC word pairs at a normal speech rate. We then isolated the second vowel from each pair and instructed 33 NSAs to rate, on a 1-7 scale (1 = certainly native, 7 = certainly nonnative), the nonnativeness of the target vowels. Results show that, irrespective of L1-L2 segment similarity, the raters were successfully able to detect accentedness in the nonnative stimuli with no overall difference in the nonnativeness ratings for short vs. long vowels.
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