The representation of Japanese moraic nasals (original) (raw)
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Perception of assimilated and non-assimilated coda nasal by Japanese learners of German
2015
This study investigates the perception of the German coda nasal contrast /n/-/m/-/ŋ/ by Japanese learners of German compared to German native speakers. The phonological distribution of coda nasals differs with/without word boundaries in the two languages. Word final coda before a pause in Japanese is neutralized to /ɴ/ but the place feature remains in German. Assimilation of coda nasals before consonants is obligatory in Japanese but not in German. Two experiments were conducted to test how syllable-final nasals with/without word boundary are perceived by Japanese speakers. The results show that Japanese listeners are sensitive to the duration of the nasal, a perceptual cue to wordfinal neutralized nasals. Durational manipulation reinforced or weakened Japanese learners' perception, suggesting that nasal assimilation is related to the length of the nasal.
2015
The accuracy with which native Japanese listeners identified American English vowels and coda nasals was assessed before and after training. The listeners were divided into four groups, each of which received a different type of training. Two of the four groups were vowel-oriented; one of these groups received vowel identification training (VI), while the other received vowel discrimination training (VD). The other two groups were nasal-oriented. One of the nasal-oriented groups received nasal identification training (NI), and the other received nasal discrimination training (ND). The results revealed that the VI group made more gains in its ability to identify vowels than the other groups after training. However, training appeared to have no effect on nasal identification, and no significant difference among the groups was observed.
THE PERCEPTION OF MORAE IN LONG VOWELS Comparison among Japanese, Korean and English speakers
1995
There are three kinds of Tokushuhaku (the specific timing morae) in the Japanese language such as the moraic nasal, the non-nasal consonant and the long vowel. Even though Japanese native speakers can perceive them perfectly, it is difficult for Japanese learners from abroad to perceive and produce them. To make it more efficient for Japanese learners to acquire them, we need to investigate how Japanese native speakers perceive Tokushuhaku.
Japanese Learner’s Ability to Pronounce Nasal Consonant /N/ Located at The End of Words
Japanedu/Jurnal Japanedu, 2022
Japanese is a language that has a unique sound and distinctive articulation, but this uniqueness sometimes makes the pronunciation of people who are learning Japanese is still a lot less precise. Therefore, this study was conducted to find out the ability of Indonesian Japanese learners to pronounce the nasal consonant sounds located at the end of a word or called uvular nasal sounds, which is in Japanese 「口蓋垂鼻音」kougaisuibion with phonetic letter symbol /N/. This study was conducted on 12 Japanese language learners at SMAN 2 Batu, using a descriptive qualitative method and then using Praat to analyse their voices while reading 3 Japanese sentences consisting of the words [hitomisan], [sumimasen], and [imasen]. This study also analysed the voice of Japanese native speakers when reading the same sentences as Japanese learners use as a reference. The results of this study are pronunciation by native speakers found nasal sounds that are pronounced in the form of nasal uvular sounds /N/, also found the existence of pronunciation that cannot be distinguished between vowels and nasal consonants from the results of Praat analysis. While for students, there are only a few that have been appropriate such as native speakers' pronunciation but most of them had different pronunciations.
Exploring Tonal Effects on the Perception of Word-Final Nasals: A Preliminary Study in Southern Min
This paper investigates the perceptual confusion pattern in the three coda nasals /-m, -n, -ŋ/ in Southern Min for insight into the effect of tone on the identification of nasal place of articulation. A general hierarchy of perceptual confusability -m>-ŋ>-n was found in the current set of data, which is compatible with the fact that /-m/ was lost first in the historical merger of coda nasals in Chinese. Tones with a high pitch at the ending point resulted in higher accuracy of nasal identification in complete syllables. However, there was no tonal effect on the identification of nasal murmur. Vowel duration and vowel-nasal formant transition were the perceptual cues that listeners mostly relied on.
Production of the utterance-final moraic nasal in Japanese: A real-time MRI study
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2021
Japanese moraic nasal /N/ is a nasal segment having the status of an independent mora. In utterance-medial position, it is realized as a nasal segment sharing the same place of articulation as the immediately following segment, but in utterance-final position, it is believed to be realized as a uvular nasal. This final-/N/-as-uvular view, which is widespread in the literature on Japanese phonetics and phonology, was examined objectively by use of a realtime MRI movie of the articulatory movement of eleven Tokyo Japanese speakers. It turned out that the utterance-final /N/ is realized in a wide range of locations on the palate from the hard palate to the uvula. GLMM modeling showed that the closure locations of the utterance-final /N/ can be predicted accurately from the identity of the preceding vowel. In addition, leave-one-out cross validation showed that the model can be generalized to new data. We conclude that the realization of utterance-final /N/ is not fixed to uvular; its place of articulation is determined largely by the property of the preceding vowel. 1 Japanese has both morae and syllables, the former being a sub-constituent of the latter in the prosodic hierarchy (Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988). Although most syllables have just one mora, there are cases of a syllable consisting of multiple (usually two) morae. Within a syllable consisting of two morae, the moraic nasal is always located in the coda position.
Perception of Japanese consonants by native speakers of American English
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008
fricatives, affricates, nasals, glides and the liquid. Twelve native speakers of American English, who had never learned Japanese, heard their utterances and spelled out what they heard in English alphabet. What was of interest was whether the listeners would perceive Japanese consonants in a way they are transcribed in English alphabet. The results revealed that Japanese stops were equated with generally the phonetically closest English stops, but voiceless stops were more likely to be equated with voiced stops of the same place of articulation than the other way around.
Language specific listening of Japanese geminate consonants: a cross-linguistic study
Frontiers in psychology, 2014
Various aspects of linguistic experience influence the way we segment, represent, and process speech signals. The Japanese phonetic and orthographic systems represent geminate consonants (double consonants, e.g., /ss/, /kk/) in a unique way compared to other languages: one abstract representation is used to characterize the first part of geminate consonants despite the acoustic difference between two distinct realizations of geminate consonants (silence in the case of e.g., stop consonants and elongation in the case of fricative consonants). The current study tests whether this discrepancy between abstract representations and acoustic realizations influences how native speakers of Japanese perceive geminate consonants. The experiments used pseudo words containing either the geminate consonant /ss/ or a manipulated version in which the first part was replaced by silence /_s/. The sound /_s/ is acoustically similar to /ss/, yet does not occur in everyday speech. Japanese listeners dem...
Acoustic Cues of Vowel Quality to Coda Nasal Perception in Southern Min
This paper investigates the effect of vowel quality on the perception of coda nasals in Southern Min. The perceptual confusion experiment revealed that /m/ is the most confusable resulted in more misidentification of following coda nasals than mid vowel / / and low vowel /a/. Within the same vowel context, higher formant frequency at the juncture of vowels and nasals and greater formant change from the midpoint to the endpoint of vowels provided more salient acoustic cues to place of articulation of post-vocalic nasals and thus resulted in higher accuracy of coda nasal identification.
Language Specific Listening of Japanese Geminate Consonants: Cross-linguistic study
Frontiers in Psychology
Various aspects of linguistic experience influence the way we segment, represent, and process speech signals. The Japanese phonetic and orthographic systems represent geminate consonants (double consonants, e.g., /ss/, /kk/) in a unique way compared to other languages: one abstract representation is used to characterize the first part of geminate consonants despite the acoustic difference between two distinct realizations of geminate consonants (silence in the case of e.g., stop consonants and elongation in the case of fricative consonants). The current study tests whether this discrepancy between abstract representations and acoustic realizations influences how native speakers of Japanese perceive geminate consonants. The experiments used pseudo words containing either the geminate consonant /ss/ or a manipulated version in which the first part was replaced by silence /_s/. The sound /_s/ is acoustically similar to /ss/, yet does not occur in everyday speech. Japanese listeners dem...