L2 Learners' Perception of Long Vowels and Geminates in Japanese Dialects

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2023-07-01

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Learners of Japanese are well known to have difficulties acquiring geminates and long vowels. What affects the perception of these has yet to be determined, with various studies coming to different conclusions about what cue learners use. In addition to these more difficult phonological features of the language, Japanese has a few different dialects that may play an additional role in perception. This study focuses on the Standard Japanese, Okinawa, and Kansai dialects. Participants completed two tasks in addition to a background questionnaire. The main task in this experiment required participants to transcribe nonwords that they heard in Hiragana. The nonwords included either a long vowel, geminate, or their minimal pairs which were short vowels and singletons, respectively. Results were analyzed in R through mixed-effects logistic regressions. The results from the main task found that perceptual accuracy dropped when learners transcribed words containing long vowels, however the dialect in which they heard the long vowels did not cause a difference in perception. In terms of geminates, participants did not perform significantly different between geminates and singletons, but similar to the results for long vowels, participants were found not to perform differently due to any of the dialects.

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