title: Taiwanese Learners' Durational Patterns for Japanese Obstruent Geminates/Singletons and Adjacent Vowels1.
abstract: This study measured the durations of Japanese obstruent geminates/singletons and their adjacent vowels (V1 and V2) embedded in words repeatedly spoken by four intermediate-level Taiwanese learners of Japanese. The results indicated that the four learners were more or less at a native-like level in terms of geminate lengthening, but not in terms of the V1/V2 duration ratio. These findings suggest that for Chinese learners of Japanese, the learning of Japanese geminates consists of two stages: geminate/singleton phonemic contrast learning, followed by V1/V2 phonetic contrast learning. It is suggested that explicit instruction may be effective at the second stage.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan.
authors.forename: Shihying
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Japanese Linguistics, Ming Chuan University, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Lijen
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan junyamd@hiroshima-u.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yamada
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D007858:Learning; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D013624:Taiwan
keywords: Japanese geminates; Taiwanese learners; adjacent vowels