中国人日本語学習者における撥音/N/の聴覚的認知

抄録

Many learners of Japanese as a second language can hardly hear out the nasal mora sound /N/. This phoneme /N/ has allophonic variants, which appear as some nasal consonants and vowels. In the exploratory interview to two Chinese learners, the most difficult case for them was the realized sound of /N/ which was a nasal consonant followed by the same consonant. The phoneme /N/ is classified by a cognitive segmentation of the lengthened nasal consonant. In this experiment, the subjects were asked to distinguish /N/ sound in the given stimulus, and to measure their threshold values by the method of limits. The subjects were four Japanese, four Chinese-experts in Japanese and four Chinese-novices in Japanese. The result showed that threshold values in ascending series were longer than in descending series for natives and novices, while experts showed reversal results. This suggested that Chinese-experts use the different strategy in perceiving /N/ sounds to attain the same level of performance as the natives. It shows similar pattern to perceiving long-vowels and double-consonants.