Categorical Perception of Spanish /y/ by Native Speakers of Japanese and Subjective Evaluation of Various Realizations of /y/ by Native Speakers of Spanish

Abstract

Beginners of Spanish whose L1 is Japanese often wonder if Spanish /y/ is similar to Japanese /y/ or to Japanese /zy/. Three perception experiments revealed that this Spanish phoneme admits a wide variety of palatal consonants as its allophones, that these consonants can be perceived by Japanese listeners sometimes as /y/ and sometimes as /zy/, or sometimes even as /gy/. In Spanish pronunciation and listening teaching, the instructor can advise Japanese learners of Spanish that they can use either Japanese /y/ or /zy/ to pronounce Spanish /y/, and that this Spanish consonant might sound like Japanese /gy/ in some occasions.