The Pronunciation of Performed Tonicity by Japanese Learners of English

Considering Correct Placement of Nucleus

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide an objective description of tonicity performance among Japanese learners of English by means of an acoustic analysis. Speech data for 30 individuals recorded in the UME-ERJ were measured with Praat. The results showed that the average pitch range of the nucleus for Japanese learners of English was approximately 6 st. The correct placement rate was 63.3% for the utterances of Japanese learners of English recorded in the UME-ERJ. These results suggest that, certain materials described in the instructions given to the participants when the database was created, such as intonation explanations and sample audio are likely to significantly increase correct placement of nucleus. Nucleus misplacement was observed for nouns, pronouns, verbs and prepositions. They suggested that we should keep in mind the possibility that nucleus misplacement could occur even in syntactic categories outside of the typology of nucleus misplacement by Japanese learners.