Is Japanese listeners' perception of English stress influenced by the antepenultimate accent in Japanese? : Comparison with English and Korean listeners

要旨

Sugahara (2011) has demonstrated that Japanese listeners were strongly biased towards iambic rhythm when judging the stress pattern of English disyllabic words presented as auditory stimuli where F0 was not a reliable cue to distinguish trochaic forms, e.g., TRANSplant, and iambic forms, e.g., transPLANT.Both the disyllabic nouns and the verbs used in Sugahara (2011) have their antepenultimate mora, i.e., their final syllable nucleus vowel, accented once they are adopted into Japanese as loanwords, and the hypothesis tested in this study is that Japanese listeners' iambic bias is due to their English stress perception being influenced by the antepenultimate accent in Japanese.A forced identification experiment was carried out to compare Japanese listeners' perception of English stress with native English listeners' and Seoul Korean listeners' perception using auditory stimuli similar to those used in Sugahara (2011).Unlike Japanese, the English vocabulary is dominated by word-initial primary stress, and there is no lexical stress/accent contrast in Seoul Korean.When the F0 information of the stimuli was synthesized in such a way as not to disambiguate the trochaic and iambic patterns, Japanese listeners showed a strong iambic bias as they did in Sugahara (2011).English listeners, on the other hand, showed no bias towards either direction.Although Seoul Korean listeners also showed an iambic bias, Japanese listeners' bias was significantly stronger than Korean listeners'.The results support the hypothesis that Japanese listeners' perception of English lexical stress is influenced by the unmarked antepenultimate accent pattern in their native language.

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