Papers by Kiyoko Yoneyama
The Influence of Lexical Factors on Word Recognition by Native English Speakers and Japanese Speakers Acquiring English: A First Report( Current Trends in Experimental OT and Laboratory Phonology)
Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, Apr 30, 2010
Abstract: English The article is a first report on a study of the influence of word frequency, wo... more Abstract: English The article is a first report on a study of the influence of word frequency, word familiarity, and phonological neighborhood density on spoken-word recognition in Japanese adults acquiring English. Three groups of listeners participated: lower-proficiency English learners in Tokyo and Saitama, Japan, higher-proficiency English learners in Minneapolis, US, and native speakers of English in Minneapolis. Following Imai, Walley, and Flege (2005), we presented listeners with 80 words that varied orthogonally in word ...
Development of L2 prosody
Generative SLA in the Age of Minimalism
Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 2003
B4-2. Production of stress-related durational patterns in Chinese learners of English(Summaries of Talks at the 25^ General Meeting)
Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, Dec 30, 2011
Production of an Allophonic Variant in a Second Language : The Case of Intervocalic Alveolar Flapping
Non‐native listeners’ representations of within‐word structure
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, May 1, 1998
A moraic nasal and a syllable structure in Japanese
B4-2. Production of stress-related durational patterns in Chinese learners of English (Summaries of Talks at the 25<sup>th</sup> General Meeting)
Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 2011
The present study investigated the extent to which lexical factors, e.g. lexical status and compe... more The present study investigated the extent to which lexical factors, e.g. lexical status and competition, affect phonetic realization of phonological structure, by examining the singleton-geminate contrast in Japanese. Stimuli were twoand three-mora minimal pairs contrasting in singleton vs. geminate stops, half of which were real words, e.g. /kako/, while the other half were similar-sounding nonwords, e.g. */nako/. Furthermore, half of the items had a lexical competitor contrasting in quantity, e.g. /kako//kakko/, while the other half did not, e.g. /tako/*/takko/. Thirty-two native Japanese speakers read the target items interspersed with filler items. Results revealed that the vowel preceding the singleton or geminate stop was shorter for real words than for nonwords. However, no significant effect of lexical competition was found. These results suggest that phonetic realization of words is affected by some lexical factors even in a non-stress-based language such as Japanese.
The paper reports the results of an experiment in second-language speech that provides further ev... more The paper reports the results of an experiment in second-language speech that provides further evidence for the view that syllable onsets and codas are asymmetric, and for the view that English proficiency affects Japanese listeners’ speech perception performance. When two groups of Japanese listeners (Japanese college students and Japanese teachers of English) were asked to count syllables in spoken English words and nonwords, the performances of both groups declined as the number of consonants in the target item increased, but onsets led to a more drastic decline in performance than did codas. The results of Japanese teachers of English further revealed that upper-level English teachers performed the task significantly better than Japanese college students whereas lower-level English teachers did significantly worse. Among the three groups of participants, lower-level English teachers were the most strongly affected by phonological constraints on syllables in Japanese.
Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 2014
Studies on phonetic realization of phonological structure have revealed that certain lexical prop... more Studies on phonetic realization of phonological structure have revealed that certain lexical properties are reflected in fine details of speech production. Examples are vowel space expansion for words with dense neighbors, and VOT increase in voiceless stops for words with voicing minimal pairs. These lexical effects are primarily found in English, but there is much to explore in phonemically and prosodically different languages, such as Japanese. The present study investigated the duration of intervals around the burst of word initial velar stops in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese which has about 200 speakers’ annotations given by trained phoneticians. Minimal pair competitors and word familiarity data are drawn from an 80,000-word database. Results show significant effects of competitors on the duration of the following vowel and word familiarity on the closure duration, which suggest that lexical effects do exist in Japanese, but in a radically different manner from English.
A speech production experiment was conducted to investigate how well native Japanese speakers can... more A speech production experiment was conducted to investigate how well native Japanese speakers can produce a non-contrastive sound in American English, namely, intervocalic alveolar flaps, and how their production varies as a function of language experience. Native Japanese speakers who have prior experience living in the US produced English sentences containing potentially flappable segments. Results showed that Japanese speakers produced alveolar flaps to varying degrees. Acoustic analysis revealed that flaps produced by Japanese speakers show properties that have previously been associated with them, such as short duration and continuous voicing. Results also showed that Japanese speakers produced alveolar flaps within words, e.g. letter, and in certain types of phrases, e.g. get on. Finally, speakers who frequently produced alveolar flaps tended to be those who arrived in the US early in their life, who stayed in the US for a long time period, and who had high scores on TOEFL iBT.
Lexically conditioned phonetic variation: A test with the voicing contrast in Japanese
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
Many lexical factors have been shown to influence phonetic realization of words. For example, stu... more Many lexical factors have been shown to influence phonetic realization of words. For example, studies have shown that voice onset time (VOT) of word-initial stops is shorter in high-frequency words than in low-frequency words, and is longer in words that form a voicing minimal pair, e.g., cod-god, than in words that do not, e.g., cop-*gop. The present study begins to ask whether such lexically conditioned phonetic variations are language-general, by examining productions of words in Japanese. The stimuli were two-mora Japanese minimal pairs contrasting in word-initial /k/ vs. /g/, half of which were real words, e.g., /kara/, while the other half were similar-sounding nonwords, e.g., */kapa/. Furthermore, half of the items had a lexical competitor contrasting in voicing, e.g., /kara/-/gara/, while the other half did not, e.g., /kana/-*/gana/. The stimuli were split so that each participant read only one member of each minimal pair. Twenty-four native Japanese speakers read the target...
Effects of Japanese Prosody on English Word Production: Interaction between Voicing and Gemination
10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020, 2020
It is well attested that vowels are longer before voiced than voiceless consonants in English. Vo... more It is well attested that vowels are longer before voiced than voiceless consonants in English. Vowel duration in productions by American English speakers (AE) is affected especially by the voicing of postvocalic consonants and the quality of the target vowel [1]. Similar voicing effects in Japanese infants and adults, and also in English produced by Japanese learners (JE) were found as well [2]. However, previous studies on voicing effects in JE overlooked an important factor: gemination in loanwords. Data from a production experiment using monosyllabic English words with and without gemination in their borrowed counterparts were analyzed. Participants were 15 university students in Tokyo from intermediate to advanced proficiency levels in English, and two AE speakers for control. Results showed that vowel duration for JE was conditioned not by post-vocalic voicing, but instead by geminatability of the word, which was independently judged by 12 Japanese listeners in a different experiment. Post-vocalic stop closure duration was longer for voiceless than voiced stops, and longer for words that were judged to have a geminate stop than words that did not, for JE but not for AE speakers. Thus, voicing effects attested in AE speech is not straightforwardly realized in JE because of the interference from Japanese prosody.
Perception of American English alveolar stops and flaps by Japanese learners of English: Does allophonic variation matter?
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016
A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English with relatively low... more A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English with relatively low English proficiency to investigate whether second-language (L2) learners utilize allophonic variation when recognizing words in L2. The stimuli consisted of 36 isolated bisyllabic words containing word-medial /t/, half of which were flap-favored words (e.g., better, city) and the other half were [t]-favored words (e.g., faster, custom). All stimuli were recorded with two surface forms: /t/ as a flap (e.g., better with a flap) or as [t] (e.g., better with [t]). The stimuli were counterbalanced in the lists using a Latin Square design, so that participants only heard one of the two surface forms. The accuracy data indicated that flap-favored words pronounced with a flap (e.g, city with a flap) were recognized significantly less accurately than [t]-favored words with a flap (e.g., faster with a flap) and [t]-favored words with [t] (e.g., faster with [t]). These results suggest that Japanes...
Interspeech 2017, 2017
Alveolar flaps are non-contrastive allophonic variants of alveolar stops in American English. A l... more Alveolar flaps are non-contrastive allophonic variants of alveolar stops in American English. A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English (JE) to investigate whether second-language (L2) learners are sensitive to such allophonic variations when recognizing words in L2. The stimuli consisted of 36 isolated bisyllabic English words containing word-medial /t/, half of which were flapfavored words, e.g. city, and the other half were [t]-favored words, e.g. faster. All stimuli were recorded with two surface forms: /t/ as a flap, e.g. city with a flap, or as [t], e.g. city with [t]. The stimuli were counterbalanced so that participants only heard one of the two surface forms of each word. The accuracy data indicated that flap-favored words pronounced with a flap, e.g. city with a flap, were recognized significantly less accurately than flap-favored words with [t], e.g. city with [t], and [t]-favored words with [t], e.g. faster with [t]. These results suggest that JE learners prefer canonical forms over frequent forms produced with context-dependent allophonic variations. These results are inconsistent with previous studies that found native speakers' preference for frequent forms, and highlight differences in the effect of allophonic variations on the perception of native-language and L2 speech.
Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, or CSJ, is a large-scale database of spontaneous Japanese. It con... more Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, or CSJ, is a large-scale database of spontaneous Japanese. It contains speech signal and transcription of about 7 million words along with various annotations like POS and phonetic labels. After describing its design issues, the potential of the CSJ as a resource for linguistic variation study was evaluated.
Exploring-Features
Analyses of the spectral features and how well they discriminate the targets, etc.
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Papers by Kiyoko Yoneyama