The timing of speech in Japanese was examined in 3 groups: native Japanese speakers, native-English fluent Japanese speakers, and native-English Japanese learners. Native speakers and fluent non-native speakers showed mora-timing rhythm of Japanese, and increased the word duration by an equal amount. Although beginners increased the word duration according to increasing number of morae in a word, the interval of increase was not equal. The ratio between the beginning of a word to the peak F0 and a whole word duration showed that native speakers and fluent speakers showed similar ratios for the same number of words with an accent in the same position. This implies that fluent speakers may use the position of F0 peak as a reference to adjust duration of a word. Therefore, learners may benefit to use facilities to display F0 contour not only for learning prosody but also learning mora-timing rhythm of Japanese.
Cite as: Kondo, M. (1998) The use of prosody for acquisition of Japanese mora-timing by English speakers. Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL), 45-49
@inproceedings{kondo98_still,
author={Mariko Kondo},
title={{The use of prosody for acquisition of Japanese mora-timing by English speakers}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL)},
pages={45--49}
}