Search

Adults are known to have difficulties acquiring suprasegmental speech that involves pitch (f0) in a second language (L2) (Graham & Post, 2018; Hirata, 2015; Wang, Spence, Jongman & Sereno, 1999; Wong & Perrachione, 2007). Previous research has suggested that the perceived similarity between L1 and L2 phonology may influence how easily segmental speech is acquired, but this notion of ‘similarity’ may also apply to suprasegmental speech (So & Best, 2010; Wu, Munro & Wang, 2014). In this paper, the L2 acquisition of Japanese lexical pitch was assessed under a ‘Suprasegmental Similarity Account’, which is a theoretical framework inspired by previous models of segmental and suprasegmental speech (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, 1995; Mennen, 2015) to account for the L2 acquisition of word prosody. Eight adult native speakers of Japanese and eight adult English-native advanced learners of Japanese participated in a perception and production study of Japanese lexical pitch patterns. Both groups performed similarly in perception, but non-native speakers performed significantly worse in production, particularly for ‘unaccented’ Low–High–High patterns. These findings are discussed in light of the ‘Suprasegmental Similarity Account’.

The mechanisms involved in the production of a speech sound vary from one speaker or iteration to the next, resulting in considerable variation in the phonetic realisation of speech sounds. The exact settings of the articulators in the production of a speech sound will vary from one speaker to the next, but, even within the same speaker, no two repetitions of a sound are quite the same. Furthermore, the phonetic realisation of a common form may vary according to an individual’s dialect, speaking style, or even in the way sounds coarticulate or overlap with each other in connected speech. Yet, despite the intrinsically gradient nature of phonetic variation, listeners are usually successful in working out the intended message of the speaker by extracting meaningful categories from the speech signal. It goes without saying, therefore, that interpreting the intention of the speaker along with the speech form he/she produces in a given context is central to the process of mapping between speech segments and abstract representations. Put another way, the communicative use of language necessarily involves extracting ‘constancy’, in the sense of category membership, from ‘variation’ in any given context.

The objective of the present study was to investigate (1) whether, and to what degree, late bilinguals of different L1 backgrounds are comparable to native speakers in the phonetic implementation of tonal targets in their L2, (2) whether they exhibit general patterns of acquisition irrespective of the typological closeness of their L1 to their L2, and (3) whether learners’ choice of accent contours and the alignment of the high tone (H∗) proceeds in parallel with proficiency in the L2. More specifically, we examined the acquisition of the nuclear contour composition and the H∗ alignment of the American English (L)H∗L- (i.e. pitch accent and boundary tone combination) in initial-stressed and final-stressed words by Japanese and Spanish late bilingual speakers at varying proficiency levels in American English. Our results show that the L1 Spanish speakers were more comparable than the L1 Japanese speakers to the native English speakers in the phonological aspect of intonation (choice of pitch accent contour). In terms of peak alignment, we found that the late bilinguals generally tended to realise significantly later alignment than the native speakers, although the precise manifestation of this varied according to the L1 background of speakers and the stress pattern of words.