An English Articulation Test Using Japanese Students

Abstract

This paper describes the articulation tests with English speech sounds which were conducted with the purpose of examining the hearing ability of English language by Japanese students, using eight college students as listeners, and as speakers: an American and a Japanese professor and a student. Every syllable used in the tests were of a conventional c-v-c type. The system used was the low-pass filter system (no filter, 1500cps and 3050cps cut-off)with three kinds of attenuation (0, 15 and 30 db). Though the vowel articulation scores in this test were found to be lower than those of American data, it is noticed that Fletcher's methods of calculating syllable articulation scores from sound articulation sores can be applied to the present data (Fig. 6). While listener's individual differences were large, it seems that speakers' difference did not influence the scores significantly. Inspection of the details of the data shows that the scores were low for the sounds like v, a, v, 1, θ which have no counterparts in Japanese speech sounds.