Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
권호 표지
DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

Japanese and Korean speakers' production of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ts/

  • Received : 2022.01.24
  • Accepted : 2022.03.15
  • Published : 2022.03.31
Download PDF
⟨ Previous Next ⟩

Abstract

This study analyzed the pronunciations of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ts/ by 24 Japanese and 40 Korean speakers using the rise and steady+decay durations of their frication part in order to clarify the characteristics of their pronunciations. Discriminant analysis revealed that Japanese speakers' /s/ and /ts/ were well classified by the acoustic boundaries defined by a discriminant function. Using this boundary, Korean speakers' production of /s/ and /ts/ was analyzed. It was found that, in Korean speakers' pronunciation, misclassification of /s/ as /ts/ was more frequent than that of /ts/ as /s/, indicating that both the /s/ and /ts/ distributions shift toward short rise and steady+decay durations. Moreover, their distributions were very similar to those of Korean fricatives and affricates. These results suggest that Korean speakers' classification error might be because of their use of Korean lax and tense fricatives to pronounce Japanese /s/, and Korean lax and tense affricates to pronounce Japanese /ts/.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP21530782, JP22320081, JP26370464, and JP17K02705. We would like to thank the National Institute of Informatics, NTT Human Interface Laboratories, and Professor Hyunsoon Kim of Hongik University in Seoul for the assistance of recordings.

References

  1. Amano, S., & Hirata, Y. (2010). Perception and production boundaries between single and geminate stops in Japanese. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128(4), 2049-2058. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3458847
  2. Amano, S., & Hirata, Y. (2015). Perception and production of singleton and geminate stops in Japanese: Implications for the theory of acoustic invariance. Phonetica, 72(1), 43-60. https://doi.org/10.1159/000430099
  3. Amano, S., & Kondo, T. (1999). Nihongo no goitokusei (Lexical properties of Japanese). Tokyo, Japan: Sanseido.
  4. Baese-Berk, M. M. (2019). Interactions between speech perception and production during learning of novel phonemic categories. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(4), 981-1005. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01725-4
  5. Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D. (2007). Nonnative and second-language speech perception. In O. S. Bohn & M. J. Munro (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (pp. 13-34). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
  6. Cho, T., Jun, S. A., & Ladefoged, P. (2002). Acoustic and aerodynamic correlates of Korean stops and fricatives. Journal of Phonetics, 30(2), 193-228. https://doi.org/10.1006/jpho.2001.0153
  7. Denes, P. B., & Pinson, E. N. (1993). The speech chain: The physics and biology of spoken language. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.
  8. Flege, J. E., & Bohn, O. S. (2021). The revised speech learning model (SLM-r). In R. Wayland (Ed.), Second language speech learning: Theoretical and empirical progress (pp. 3-83). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  9. Ha, S., Johnson, C. J., & Kuehn, D. P. (2009). Characteristics of Korean phonology: Review, tutorial, and case studies of Korean children speaking English. Journal of Communication Disorders, 42(3), 163-179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2009.01.002
  10. Kang, K. S. (2000). On Korean fricatives. Speech Sciences, 7(3), 53-68.
  11. Kubozono, H. (2015). Introduction to Japanese phonetics and phonology. In H. Kubozono (Ed.), Handbook of Japanese phonetics and phonology (pp. 1-40). Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton.
  12. Matsuzaki, H. (1999). Phonetic education of Japanese for Korean speakers. Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 3, 26-35.
  13. Shin, J. (2015). Vowels and consonants. In L. Brown & J. Yeon (Eds.), The handbook of Korean linguistics (pp. 3-21). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  14. Sukegawa, Y. (1993). Utterance tendency of non-native Japanese speakers: Results of questionnaire survey. Japanese speech and education, Research Report of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas by Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 187-222.
  15. Yamakawa, K., & Amano, S. (2015). Discrimination of Japanese fricatives and affricates by production boundaries in time and spectral domains: A case study of a female native speaker. Acoustical Science and Technology, 36(4), 296-301. https://doi.org/10.1250/ast.36.296
  16. Yamakawa, K., Amano, S., & Itahashi, S. (2012). Variables to discriminate affricate [ts] and fricative [s] at word initial in spoken Japanese words. Acoustical Science and Technology, 33(3), 154-159. https://doi.org/10.1250/ast.33.154
  17. Vance, T. J. (2008). The sounds of Japanese. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  18. Zimmermann, G. N., Price, P. J., & Ayusawa, T. (1984). The production of English /r/ and /l/ by two Japanese speakers differing in experience with English. Journal of Phonetics, 12(3), 187-193. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30873-3