Presentation

Native Speakers’ Redundant Acoustic Cue may be Learners’ Treasure: Can Pitch be Repurposed?

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Abstract

Instructors of Japanese commonly notice Mandarin speakers’ perceptual difficulty in identifying Japanese voicing categories. The Mandarin phonological system seems to make learners ‘deaf’ to essential/primary acoustic cues (pre-voicing cues) used by Japanese native speakers, so they may need to rely on other acoustic cues, such as pitch cues on post-stop vowels which are redundant/secondary for category identification. However, since pitch categorically co-varies with voicing cues (high pitch: voiceless, low pitch: voiced), we hypothesized that pitch could play an important role for Mandarin speakers because of their sensitivity to pitch thanks to the L1 tonal system. We used a gating paradigm to test whether learners rely on pitch cues to identify voicing categories. Learners (L1: Mandarin or English) and Japanese native speakers heard fragments of non-words and identified voicing categories in word-initial position based only on pitch cues on following vowels (e.g., /tasɯbiː/ without /t/, i.e., /asɯbiː/). The results showed that Mandarin speakers indeed used pitch cues and outperformed L1 Japanese/English speakers, i.e., the way pitch is used in L1 matters in determining how important or redundant pitch cues can be. Based on the results, we discuss the goal of perception training in the spirit of the Intelligibility Principle.

Keywords: Japanese, voicing contrast, cue-weighting, cue-reweighting, gating

How to Cite:

Iwamoto, K. & Darcy, I. (2024). Native Speakers’ Redundant Acoustic Cue may be Learners’ Treasure: Can Pitch be Repurposed? In D. J. Olson, J. L. Sturm, O. Dmitrieva, & J. M. Levis (eds), Proceedings of 14th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, (pp. 1-12) Purdue University, September 2023. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.17555