University of Oregon
Tetsuo Harada is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Japanese applied linguistics and Japanese language courses. While at UCLA and in Japan, he taught intermediate and advanced ESL courses and all levels of Japanese. His research interests include second language phonetics and phonology, L2 learning and teaching, listening in a second language, immersion education, and Japanese language teaching.
This study acoustically analyzed the production of geminates (/pp, tt, kk/) in Japanese by English-speaking children in grades 1, 3, and 5 (N=19) in a Japanese immersion program. In addition, 52 native speakers of Japanese rated the contrast between single and geminate consonants produced by the immersion children.
For single and geminate consonants, Han (1992) found that the duration of L1 English speakersÅf Japanese geminates is shorter than that of Japanese monolinguals. However, my results show that both the immersion childrenÅfs geminates and their singletons were longer than those of the Japanese monolinguals. In addition, the immersion childrenÅfs mean ratio for singletons to geminates was smaller than that of the monolinguals.
The accent ratings by the Japanese native speakers suggest that the immersion children retain a noticeable L1 accent and there is no statistical difference in the scores of accentedness across the grade levels. Moreover, the degree of perceived accentedness for all the immersion children correlated fairly highly with their ratio of singletons to geminates (r = 0.773, p < 0.0001). This suggests that the ratio of singletons to geminates is a good measure of the acquisition of the phonemic contrast between them.
Harada sensei's paper is at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~tharada/SenseiOnline.htm
So read the paper above and go to TAPPED IN. There, you will be able to discuss this topic with Joseph sensei and others from around the world. TAPPED IN is open to everybody and the presentation will be done in English.
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