Verdonschot Rinus G, Masuda Hinako
Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, Institute of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima University, 1-2-3 Kasumi, Minami-ku, Hiroshima, 734-8553, Japan.
Faculty of Science and Technology, Seikei University, Musashino, Japan.
Psychol Res. 2020 Apr;84(3):547-557. doi: 10.1007/s00426-018-1073-9. Epub 2018 Sep 3.
An ongoing debate in the speech production literature suggests that the initial building block to build up speech sounds differs between languages. That is, Germanic languages are suggested to use the phoneme, but Japanese and Chinese are proposed to use the mora or syllable, respectively. Several studies investigated this matter from a chronometric perspective (i.e., RTs and accuracy). However, a less attention has been paid to the actual acoustic utterances. The current study investigated the verbal responses of two Japanese-English bilingual groups of different proficiency levels (i.e., high and low) when naming English words and found that the presence or absence of vowel epenthesis depended on proficiency. The results indicate that: (1) English word pronunciation by low-proficient Japanese English bilinguals is likely based on their L1 (Japanese) building block and (2) that future studies would benefit from analyzing the acoustic data as well when making inferences from chronometric data.
言语产生文献中正在进行的一场争论表明，构建语音的初始组成部分在不同语言之间存在差异。也就是说，有人认为日耳曼语系使用音素，而日语和汉语分别使用拍或音节。几项研究从计时角度（即反应时间和准确性）对这个问题进行了调查。然而，对于实际的语音发声却较少受到关注。当前的研究调查了两个不同熟练程度（即高和低）的日英双语组在命名英语单词时的言语反应，发现元音插入的有无取决于熟练程度。结果表明：（1）低熟练程度的日英双语者对英语单词的发音可能基于他们的第一语言（日语）组成部分，以及（2）未来的研究在从计时数据进行推断时，若同时分析声学数据将会受益。
