Kaori Idemaru - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Kaori Idemaru
JASA express letters, Mar 1, 2022
Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. ... more Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization is talker-specific is understudied. This experiment investigated whether Japanese listeners' perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: a singleton-geminate stop contrast and short-long vowel contrast in Japanese. The results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers' speech regardless of whether the target contrasts depended on silent closure duration or vowel duration. Our results thus support the view that speaking rate normalization is an obligatory process that happens in the early phase of perception. V
Stop Production by North Korean Refugee Speakers Living in South Korea
Learning from a single cue: Is phonetic learning dimension-based?
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Phonetic cue-weighting, the process of altering the weights of certain dimensions (e.g., F0) in t... more Phonetic cue-weighting, the process of altering the weights of certain dimensions (e.g., F0) in the speech signal, is a fundamental process in speech perception. Cue-reweighting is the process of adaptation required for understanding new accents and learning second language speech contrasts; however, little is understood about the underlying mechanisms. Harmon et al. (2019) examined three candidate mechanisms (distributional, supervised, and reinforcement learning) showing evidence for reinforcement learning. The current study investigates Harmon et al.’s (2019) assumed phonetic dimensions by asking how a single cue in a phonetic dimension (e.g., a single voice onset time (VOT) value) of a phonological contrast ([b]/[p]) generalizes to other values of the phonetic dimension. Said simpler, is phonetic learning dimension-based? Native English listeners (N = 270) participated in an online perceptual training experiment in which participants were asked to identify word contrasts like pe...
The perception of Japanese singleton/geminate contrasts by native and non-native listeners was co... more The perception of Japanese singleton/geminate contrasts by native and non-native listeners was compared to examine if not only specific but general foreign language experience might facilitate the processing of unfamiliar sounds. Three groups of non-native listeners and a native Japanese control group participated in the AXB discrimination experiment. As expected, native Japanese listeners outperformed non-native listeners in discriminating Japanese length contrasts. While learners of Japanese did not match the native level of performance, they were more accurate than listeners with other foreign language experience, suggesting that general experience may not transfer positively to the processing of Japanese length contrasts.
Comparative analysis of South Korean and North Korean vowels: A pilot study
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
This study investigates cardinal vowels of standard North Korean and South Korean. Prior reports ... more This study investigates cardinal vowels of standard North Korean and South Korean. Prior reports have suggested that North and South Korean vowels have undergone changes after decades of relative isolation. This poster reports a pilot study investigating the ways in which the language standards of North and South Korea are similar and different by examining the speech of newscasters from each country. Acoustic analysis of the speech data suggested that North Korean vowels [ɛ] and [æ] were produced in the higher position relative to the South Korean counterparts, and the back vowels [ʌ] and [o] showed overlapping formant values unlike the South Korean counterparts. The perception experiment suggested that South Korean listeners could not accurately identify the North Korean [ʌ] and [o]. These results indicate that there may be interesting differences across North Korean and South Korean vowels.
Articles: Language, Education; Role of amplitude and pitch in the perception of Japanese stop Length contrasts
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative p... more The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such asteeny), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of social relations via vocal modulation, such as lowering one's voice pitch to signal dominance. Among other things, the frequency code is commonly interpreted to suggest that polite speech should be universally signalled via high pitch owing to the association of high pitch with small size and submissiveness. We present a cross-cultural meta-analysis of polite speech of 101 speakers from seven different languages. While we find evidence for cross-cultural variation, voice pitch is on average lower when speakers speak politely, contrary to what the frequency code predicts. We interpret our findings in the light of the fact that pitch has a mu...
F0-VOT Separate Statistics
OSF, Jan 16, 2020
The use of a voice onset time cue in the perception of Seoul Korean stops as a function of listener gender
Korean Journal of Linguistics, 2018
Acoustic covariants of the Japanese geminate/singleton contrast and their relative perception
Language in Society, 2021
Previous work on the Osaka dialect (OD) collectively suggests that this western regional variant ... more Previous work on the Osaka dialect (OD) collectively suggests that this western regional variant of Japanese is associated with informality, masculinity, and affective fatherhood—social meanings that can be recruited in the construction of audio-visual media personas. This study examines the use of OD by one protagonist in the film Soshite chichi ni naru/Like father, like son, as well as the social meanings that listeners attribute to this variety of Japanese. Specifically, we ask two questions: (i) to what extent is the production of OD in the film recognizable to native speakers of Japanese, and (ii) what qualities do Japanese language users attribute to OD? A dialect recognition experiment found low recognizability of OD but high recognizability of a general ‘nonstandard Japanese’ language variety. Qualitative data revealed that Japanese language users perceived OD to index various characteristics including that of a masculine, affective father. (Perception, dialect, fatherhood, ...
Effects of L2 experience on Mandarin listeners’ perception of Korean politeness
Lingua
Foreign Accent in L2 Japanese
Second Language Speech Learning, 2021
Effects of First Language Background and Learning Experience in Perceiving Mandarin Lexical Tones: Learners and Nonlearners From English- and Japanese-Speaking Backgrounds
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2022
Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and... more Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1–T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1–T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1–T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2–T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2–T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3–T4]) on account of their L1. Method: The participants included two groups of learners of Mandarin (23 English speakers, 18 Japanese speakers), two groups of nonlearners of Mandarin (24 English speakers, 21 Japanese speakers), and a control group of 10 Mandarin speakers. A four-alternative forced-choice discrimination task that included 360 trials was presented in three blocks of 120 trials. Results: The native Mandarin group was more accurate in their tonal discrimination of all six tone pairs than all the nonnative groups. While Japanese nonlearners generally outperformed English nonlearners in their overall perception of Mandarin lexical tones, L1-based differences were les...
Previous studies have reported that some North Korean and South Korean vowels have undergone chan... more Previous studies have reported that some North Korean and South Korean vowels have undergone changes in different directions after decades of relative isolation. This paper presents a pilot study concentrating on three such pairs of vowels ([ɯ]-[u], [ʌ]-[o], and [e]-[æ]), with a particular interest in examining language standards in each variety by comparing newscasters and regular speakers from each country. Acoustic analyses of vowel spaces confirmed some North-South differences, and a perception test verified that North Korean [ʌ] and [o] are highly confusable to South Korean speakers. Noteworthy in the data, North Korean regular speakers who now reside in South Korea showed some vowel patterns that were different from both North Korean newscasters and South Korean speech.
Foreign accent in L2 Japanese: A cross-sectional study
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
The current study examines acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produce... more The current study examines acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produced by American learners across different instructional levels and learning backgrounds. Our prior work has demonstrated that pitch accent, vowel duration, and spectral information of the vowel [e] influence perceived foreign accent in Japanese short sentences produced by intermediate learners, with pitch accent exerting the strongest influence. Building on this prior finding, the current study examines Japanese produced by American learners at the beginning level (n = 10), at the intermediate level (n = 16), American learners who have had early exposure to Japanese (n = 10), native Japanese speakers (n = 10), and ratings of the speech samples by native Japanese listeners (n = 10) to investigate the difference in the extent of perceived accent in their speech and the acoustic sources that influence perceived accent. The results of the current study shed light on issues related to developme...
Acoustic Characteristics of Foreign Accent in L2 Japanese: A Cross-Sectional Study
This study reports an exploratory analysis of the acoustic characteristics of second language spe... more This study reports an exploratory analysis of the acoustic characteristics of second language speech that affect perception of a foreign accent. Japanese speech samples were collected from native Japanese speakers and native English learners of Japanese across different instructional levels and learning backgrounds. Native Japanese raters rated the speech samples for foreign accentedness. While pitch accent, articulation rate, and vowel duration influenced perceived accentedness of the speech samples in general, the relative importance of these acoustic features varied across speaker groups. The current results shed light on issues related to development of second language speech, and the perceptual relevance of the development as perceived by lay listeners.
It has been found that Korean speakers lower their average voice pitch when speaking politely [16... more It has been found that Korean speakers lower their average voice pitch when speaking politely [16, 17], contradicting the idea that high pitch is polite across all cultures, as proposed by Ohala’s Frequency Code hypothesis [e.g., 12]. This study looks at pitch as a perceptual cue to politeness in Korean. Ten Korean listeners heard short utterances from eight different speakers and judged whether each utterance was spoken in a polite (contaymal) or informal (panmal) register. Results indicate that F0 manipulation did affect politeness perception, but with an unexpected gender effect: High pitch was perceived as polite by Korean females and as informal by Korean males. These findings suggest a mismatch of politeness production and perception, and they reveal important gender differences in how the same acoustic cues are imbued with different kinds of politeness meanings.
Mandarin is one of the most representative tonal languages with four contrastive tone categories ... more Mandarin is one of the most representative tonal languages with four contrastive tone categories (Tone 1 (T1): high level (ā), Tone 2 (T2): high rising (á), Tone 3 (T3): dipping (ǎ), Tone 4 (T4): high falling (à)). Learning Mandarin tones is known to be difficult for speakers from diverse first language (L1) backgrounds. We examined how individuals differing in L1 (English, Japanese) and experience with Mandarin (learners, non-learners) might respond to six pairs of Mandarin tones using a four-alternative forced-choice discrimination test. The results showed that while Japanese non-learners generally outperformed English non-learners, possibly benefitting from contrastive use of pitch accent in L1, two groups of learners did not differ in their perception of Mandarin lexical tones. This suggests that English speakers can overcome the initial disadvantage and learn lexical tones in a new language as successfully as speakers of other Asian language.
JASA express letters, Mar 1, 2022
Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. ... more Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization is talker-specific is understudied. This experiment investigated whether Japanese listeners' perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: a singleton-geminate stop contrast and short-long vowel contrast in Japanese. The results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers' speech regardless of whether the target contrasts depended on silent closure duration or vowel duration. Our results thus support the view that speaking rate normalization is an obligatory process that happens in the early phase of perception. V
Stop Production by North Korean Refugee Speakers Living in South Korea
Learning from a single cue: Is phonetic learning dimension-based?
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Phonetic cue-weighting, the process of altering the weights of certain dimensions (e.g., F0) in t... more Phonetic cue-weighting, the process of altering the weights of certain dimensions (e.g., F0) in the speech signal, is a fundamental process in speech perception. Cue-reweighting is the process of adaptation required for understanding new accents and learning second language speech contrasts; however, little is understood about the underlying mechanisms. Harmon et al. (2019) examined three candidate mechanisms (distributional, supervised, and reinforcement learning) showing evidence for reinforcement learning. The current study investigates Harmon et al.’s (2019) assumed phonetic dimensions by asking how a single cue in a phonetic dimension (e.g., a single voice onset time (VOT) value) of a phonological contrast ([b]/[p]) generalizes to other values of the phonetic dimension. Said simpler, is phonetic learning dimension-based? Native English listeners (N = 270) participated in an online perceptual training experiment in which participants were asked to identify word contrasts like pe...
The perception of Japanese singleton/geminate contrasts by native and non-native listeners was co... more The perception of Japanese singleton/geminate contrasts by native and non-native listeners was compared to examine if not only specific but general foreign language experience might facilitate the processing of unfamiliar sounds. Three groups of non-native listeners and a native Japanese control group participated in the AXB discrimination experiment. As expected, native Japanese listeners outperformed non-native listeners in discriminating Japanese length contrasts. While learners of Japanese did not match the native level of performance, they were more accurate than listeners with other foreign language experience, suggesting that general experience may not transfer positively to the processing of Japanese length contrasts.
Comparative analysis of South Korean and North Korean vowels: A pilot study
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
This study investigates cardinal vowels of standard North Korean and South Korean. Prior reports ... more This study investigates cardinal vowels of standard North Korean and South Korean. Prior reports have suggested that North and South Korean vowels have undergone changes after decades of relative isolation. This poster reports a pilot study investigating the ways in which the language standards of North and South Korea are similar and different by examining the speech of newscasters from each country. Acoustic analysis of the speech data suggested that North Korean vowels [ɛ] and [æ] were produced in the higher position relative to the South Korean counterparts, and the back vowels [ʌ] and [o] showed overlapping formant values unlike the South Korean counterparts. The perception experiment suggested that South Korean listeners could not accurately identify the North Korean [ʌ] and [o]. These results indicate that there may be interesting differences across North Korean and South Korean vowels.
Articles: Language, Education; Role of amplitude and pitch in the perception of Japanese stop Length contrasts
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative p... more The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such asteeny), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of social relations via vocal modulation, such as lowering one's voice pitch to signal dominance. Among other things, the frequency code is commonly interpreted to suggest that polite speech should be universally signalled via high pitch owing to the association of high pitch with small size and submissiveness. We present a cross-cultural meta-analysis of polite speech of 101 speakers from seven different languages. While we find evidence for cross-cultural variation, voice pitch is on average lower when speakers speak politely, contrary to what the frequency code predicts. We interpret our findings in the light of the fact that pitch has a mu...
F0-VOT Separate Statistics
OSF, Jan 16, 2020
The use of a voice onset time cue in the perception of Seoul Korean stops as a function of listener gender
Korean Journal of Linguistics, 2018
Acoustic covariants of the Japanese geminate/singleton contrast and their relative perception
Language in Society, 2021
Previous work on the Osaka dialect (OD) collectively suggests that this western regional variant ... more Previous work on the Osaka dialect (OD) collectively suggests that this western regional variant of Japanese is associated with informality, masculinity, and affective fatherhood—social meanings that can be recruited in the construction of audio-visual media personas. This study examines the use of OD by one protagonist in the film Soshite chichi ni naru/Like father, like son, as well as the social meanings that listeners attribute to this variety of Japanese. Specifically, we ask two questions: (i) to what extent is the production of OD in the film recognizable to native speakers of Japanese, and (ii) what qualities do Japanese language users attribute to OD? A dialect recognition experiment found low recognizability of OD but high recognizability of a general ‘nonstandard Japanese’ language variety. Qualitative data revealed that Japanese language users perceived OD to index various characteristics including that of a masculine, affective father. (Perception, dialect, fatherhood, ...
Effects of L2 experience on Mandarin listeners’ perception of Korean politeness
Lingua
Foreign Accent in L2 Japanese
Second Language Speech Learning, 2021
Effects of First Language Background and Learning Experience in Perceiving Mandarin Lexical Tones: Learners and Nonlearners From English- and Japanese-Speaking Backgrounds
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2022
Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and... more Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1–T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1–T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1–T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2–T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2–T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3–T4]) on account of their L1. Method: The participants included two groups of learners of Mandarin (23 English speakers, 18 Japanese speakers), two groups of nonlearners of Mandarin (24 English speakers, 21 Japanese speakers), and a control group of 10 Mandarin speakers. A four-alternative forced-choice discrimination task that included 360 trials was presented in three blocks of 120 trials. Results: The native Mandarin group was more accurate in their tonal discrimination of all six tone pairs than all the nonnative groups. While Japanese nonlearners generally outperformed English nonlearners in their overall perception of Mandarin lexical tones, L1-based differences were les...
Previous studies have reported that some North Korean and South Korean vowels have undergone chan... more Previous studies have reported that some North Korean and South Korean vowels have undergone changes in different directions after decades of relative isolation. This paper presents a pilot study concentrating on three such pairs of vowels ([ɯ]-[u], [ʌ]-[o], and [e]-[æ]), with a particular interest in examining language standards in each variety by comparing newscasters and regular speakers from each country. Acoustic analyses of vowel spaces confirmed some North-South differences, and a perception test verified that North Korean [ʌ] and [o] are highly confusable to South Korean speakers. Noteworthy in the data, North Korean regular speakers who now reside in South Korea showed some vowel patterns that were different from both North Korean newscasters and South Korean speech.
Foreign accent in L2 Japanese: A cross-sectional study
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
The current study examines acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produce... more The current study examines acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produced by American learners across different instructional levels and learning backgrounds. Our prior work has demonstrated that pitch accent, vowel duration, and spectral information of the vowel [e] influence perceived foreign accent in Japanese short sentences produced by intermediate learners, with pitch accent exerting the strongest influence. Building on this prior finding, the current study examines Japanese produced by American learners at the beginning level (n = 10), at the intermediate level (n = 16), American learners who have had early exposure to Japanese (n = 10), native Japanese speakers (n = 10), and ratings of the speech samples by native Japanese listeners (n = 10) to investigate the difference in the extent of perceived accent in their speech and the acoustic sources that influence perceived accent. The results of the current study shed light on issues related to developme...
Acoustic Characteristics of Foreign Accent in L2 Japanese: A Cross-Sectional Study
This study reports an exploratory analysis of the acoustic characteristics of second language spe... more This study reports an exploratory analysis of the acoustic characteristics of second language speech that affect perception of a foreign accent. Japanese speech samples were collected from native Japanese speakers and native English learners of Japanese across different instructional levels and learning backgrounds. Native Japanese raters rated the speech samples for foreign accentedness. While pitch accent, articulation rate, and vowel duration influenced perceived accentedness of the speech samples in general, the relative importance of these acoustic features varied across speaker groups. The current results shed light on issues related to development of second language speech, and the perceptual relevance of the development as perceived by lay listeners.
It has been found that Korean speakers lower their average voice pitch when speaking politely [16... more It has been found that Korean speakers lower their average voice pitch when speaking politely [16, 17], contradicting the idea that high pitch is polite across all cultures, as proposed by Ohala’s Frequency Code hypothesis [e.g., 12]. This study looks at pitch as a perceptual cue to politeness in Korean. Ten Korean listeners heard short utterances from eight different speakers and judged whether each utterance was spoken in a polite (contaymal) or informal (panmal) register. Results indicate that F0 manipulation did affect politeness perception, but with an unexpected gender effect: High pitch was perceived as polite by Korean females and as informal by Korean males. These findings suggest a mismatch of politeness production and perception, and they reveal important gender differences in how the same acoustic cues are imbued with different kinds of politeness meanings.
Mandarin is one of the most representative tonal languages with four contrastive tone categories ... more Mandarin is one of the most representative tonal languages with four contrastive tone categories (Tone 1 (T1): high level (ā), Tone 2 (T2): high rising (á), Tone 3 (T3): dipping (ǎ), Tone 4 (T4): high falling (à)). Learning Mandarin tones is known to be difficult for speakers from diverse first language (L1) backgrounds. We examined how individuals differing in L1 (English, Japanese) and experience with Mandarin (learners, non-learners) might respond to six pairs of Mandarin tones using a four-alternative forced-choice discrimination test. The results showed that while Japanese non-learners generally outperformed English non-learners, possibly benefitting from contrastive use of pitch accent in L1, two groups of learners did not differ in their perception of Mandarin lexical tones. This suggests that English speakers can overcome the initial disadvantage and learn lexical tones in a new language as successfully as speakers of other Asian language.