In much of previous research on the acquisition of Japanese lexical accent by English learners, no distinction has been made between the direct influence of Standard Japanese on the one hand, and chance correspondences between Standard Japanese and the learners' interlanguage on the other. A study was carried out in which phonetically trained Japanese native speakers identified the accent types of 2- and 3-mora isolated nouns produced by 13 less experienced and 8 more experienced British English learners of Japanese, and these were compared with Standard Japanese (SJ) accent types. The less experienced and more experienced learners differed in the amount of Japanese tuition they had received and the length of time they had spent in Japan, and stimuli were chosen that were expected to be familiar to the learners. Two-mora nouns showed the result that, for both groups of learners, whether a word was produced with initial or no accent had no relation to its accent type in SJ. For 3-mora nouns, a statistically significant influence of SJ was observed for both groups of learners, but the correspondence with SJ was not high, regardless of Japanese experience. These results imply that much - or, in the case of 2-mora nouns, all - of the correspondence with a word's SJ accent type can be attributed to chance matches with the learner's interlanguage, and may suggest that English learners of Japanese have difficulty in recognising pitch as a lexical property.

The absence of a natural “rhythm” when reading aloud is frequently observed in foreign language learners (L2 learners). These rhythmic or prosodic errors in oral reading may be due to a lack of comprehension of certain syntactic structures. As little research on prosody in L2 oral reading exists, the current study attempted to describe the relationship between prosody and sentence comprehension in L2 Japanese through the use of an oral reading task. This study specifically examined the relationship between prosodic production of branching modifiers and comprehension in American JFL learners. Two proficiency groups of JFL learners were presented with a series of sentences containing both syntactically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences, each followed by a comprehension question. A control group of native speakers of Japanese was also included in the analysis in order to compare reading prosody. Experimental results suggest that the learners were often incapable of producing the correct prosody, despite their generally high comprehension ability. It was concluded that prosody is disassociated from comprehension by JFL learners in the sentence types examined.

This paper addresses the issue of variable past tense morphology in second language (L2) acquisition. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the production of past tense morphology in English poses persistent difficulties to some L2 learners (e.g. Lardiere, 1998a; 1998b; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003). We examine the validity of two hypotheses which have been proposed to explain the cause of such difficulties, namely the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH) (Hawkins, 2001; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003) and the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) (Goad, Steel & White, 2003; Goad & White, 2004; 2006). The former holds that there is variability in past tense morphology because learners whose first language (L1) lacks the past tense feature are unable to acquire it post-puberty. The PTH, on the other hand, claims that learners are able to acquire the past tense feature but have difficulties in the production of a past tense morpheme when prosodic structures to organize inflectional material differ between their L1 and L2. In this study, we investigate whether Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese are able to achieve the target-like knowledge and production of past tense morphology in Japanese; Japanese has the past tense feature while Chinese does not. Chinese and Japanese are similar, however, with regard to how prosodic structures for inflectional material are organized. Thus, if Chinese speakers have difficulties producing past tense morphology in Japanese, the locus of the problem is likely to be their inability to acquire the past tense feature, supporting the RDH. If, on the other hand, Chinese speakers do not have problems with Japanese past tense morphology, the problem we observe in Chinese-English interlanguage is likely to be due to the difference in prosodic structures, supporting the PTH. Testing 12 Chinese-speaking learners who were at intermediate and advanced levels, we found that although some Chinese speakers had difficulties with past tense inflection, others were able to use the Japanese past tense inflection -ta reliably, both in written form and spontaneous production. Therefore, our results support the PTH.

This study investigated intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by Australian English speakers and the influence of their first language (L1) prosody. The second language (L2) intonation is a complicated product of the L1 transfer at two levels of prosodic hierarchy, at word level and at phrase levels. For each level, the typical error patterns were listed and described in terms of L2 acquisition in the first part. In the second part, intonation contours were acoustically measured and compared with native speakers' model. The result shows that it is not a necessary assessment criterion for L2 pronunciation to have an identical intonation contour to the native model, but indicates that correct lexical pitch patterns make a significant impact on the pitch contour of a sentence in Japanese and is worthy to instruct learners carefully.