A study of short and long vowels in Taiwanese Japanese learners

• Main Authors: Tsung-hao Tsai, 蔡宗豪
• Other Authors: Hsin-yi Hung
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/04665565572023453188

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用日語研究所 === 103 === In Japanese, the meaning of words would be different by the change of the lengthen of vowel sounds. For instance,「kate（カテ）,kate:（カテイ）」or「kokan（コカン）,ko:kan（コウカン）」etc. However, Chinese does not share this linguistic feature. That is, meaning would not change by the lengthiness of sounds. Therefore, it seems to be difficult for Chinese Japanese learners to distinguish and pronounce long and short vowels appropriately. Present study aims to survey Chinese Japanese learners’ performance on their production of long and short vowels and the relationship between the utterance of long vowels and difficulty of pronunciation through phonetic experiment. In order to survey the production of long short vowel, four groups of words were selected for participants to pronounce. They are minimal pairs, like「toko（トコ）,toko:（トコウ）」「kato（カト）,kato:（カトウ）」「koko（ココ）,ko:ko（コウコ）」「toka（トカ）,to:ka（トウカ）」.The approach of data analysis is to compare participants’ utterance of long and short vowels and their features with Japanese native speakers’ through measuring their duration of producing vowels. The segment length was measured by the RM analysis method. The results pointed out that 1) Participants tend to produce long vowels in a shorter manner and produce short vowels in a longer manner. 2) As their Japanese language abilities improve, the speakers’ vowel duration and control becomes native-like. 3) There is a significant difference between vowel length time of initial syllable and the time in ending syllable that produced by the participants. Then, they seem to have more difficulties in producing proper lengthen of vowels in ending syllable. 4) Based on the JLPT test, Japanese learners in levels N1, N2, N3 exceed N4 and N5 learners in controlling long and short vowels in their appropriate lengthen.