Tag: Kaori Idemaru

Foreign Accent Production and Perception: An Acoustic Analysis of L2 Japanese

Presenter: Lucy Gubbins, Linguistics

Panel: Foregin Accent & Foreign Policy: An Analytical Perspective

Mentor: Kaori Idemaru, East Asian Languages and Literatures

AM Session Panels

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

Location: Century E

The acquisition of a second language (L2) is wrought with potential difficulties. Not only must a learner establish grammatical competency in order to effectively communicate, but he/she must also adopt the pronunciation of the target language. This often proves to be an insurmountable task: even after acquiring native-like grammatical fluency in a second language, it is extremely difficult to speak without traces of a foreign accent. When native speakers are confronted with non-native speech, a number of acoustic characteristics can lead to the perception of foreign accent, which is what the present study explores. The first experiment investigates the acoustic qualities of vowels (i.e., F1 and F2) and stop consonants produced by native English speakers who are 2nd- and 4th-year learners of Japanese. The second experiment examines native listener judgments of foreign accent and how they compare with the segmental differences found in the production data. Preliminary results from the production experiment show that non-native learners differ significantly from native speakers in their production of the high back vowel /u/, as well as in the duration of voice-onset time before stop consonants. These findings reveal that even after significant exposure to Japanese in the classroom, L2 learners struggle to achieve native-like production of these features, giving language instructors significant insight into specific problem areas native English speakers might encounter when learning Japanese pronunciation.

Japanese Gendered Language, Idols, and the Ideal Female Romantic Partner

Presenter(s): Jacqueline Huaman − Japanese, Asian Studies

Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru

Oral Session 1SW

Research Area: Humanities

Funding: HURF (Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship), UROP Mini-Grant

The goal of my honors thesis is to explore how gendered language, or lack thereof, is utilized in Japanese society to perpetuate feminine ideals in the media. Specifically, I want to focus on how the ideal female romantic partner is portrayed in modern media through the use of language. Japanese has been considered a very gendered language. However, more recent research has questioned whether the description of gendered features in Japanese reflects language ideology or language reality.

For example, in 2004, Janet Shibamoto-Smith investigated language and its use as a cultural model for romance, specifically looking at how language was used by the protagonists of romance novels in the 1980s and 1990s in Japan. Similarly, I want to explore how idol music and popular television shows serve as models for romance and ideal female partners in contemporary society. Following the methodology set up by Shibamoto-Smith, I will develop a retrospective study and a corpus study to investigate language use in the media of the 2000s and 2010s in order to analyze the linguistic representations of an ideal female partner. I expect to find the use of gendered markers, and lack thereof, to correlate with the type of ideal being portrayed in the media, as substantiated by the society in which this media exists.

Effects of Gender Transition on Language Use in Second Language Acquisition of Japanese

Presenter(s): Dylan Williams

Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru

Poster 146

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

Issues related to identity play an important role in guiding learners as they acquire a new language. The purpose of this study was to examine how gender transition may affect the use of linguistic gender-forms during language acquisition. Japanese is a highly gendered language, with varying degree of feminine and masculine forms in pronouns and sentence ending particles. My learning of Japanese and experience with transition provided an opportunity to analyze the interaction between the two. In order to conduct this study, I completed an autoethnography of my own past journal writings from the Japanese 301 and 302 courses here at the UO. The analysis revealed heavy avoidance of explicitly gendered forms and a strategy of solely using neutral pronouns and sentence ending particles, reflecting a low comfort level between using gender-matched features and the struggle with gender identity. The anxiety associated with transition appeared to have influenced language performance, also leading to less classroom interaction and involvement. The implication of this study is that students in this situation are not fully able to center themselves as users of that language, and so are less likely to center themselves in classwork. More support from instructors and researchers is needed in order to properly address the obstacles that trans students face, such as alleviating anxiety due to gender transition and understanding how it influences language use. Such efforts could address gender in broader ways, leading to overall more inclusive, comfortable, and inviting classroom environment that encourages language use and learning.

The Role of Intonation in Japanese Politeness

Presenter(s): Allene Shaw

Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru

Oral Session 1 SW

The purpose of this study is to examine linguistic relationships between phonetics (the way people sound) and politeness in Japanese. Prior studies investigated voice characteristics in Japanese deferential speech (addressed to persons of superior social status) and non-deferential speech (used with persons of equal or inferior status). They found that the Japanese language exploits phonetic features to express politeness (Idemaru et al, forthcoming). Their study, however, observed overall intonation for entire utterances. I propose to conduct a more detailed analysis of their data, by dividing utterances into meaningful phrases in order to determine where in a sentence intonation is employed to express politeness. Understanding how and where important social cues like politeness are embedded in speech is critical for understanding how communications work in Japanese society and also for developing language and cultural fluency, particularly for non-native language learners.

Traditional research on politeness typically focused on type of words and grammatical features used to communicate politeness in various languages. However, a new wave of research began examining other dimensions such as voice characteristics and gestures (e.g., Winter and Grawunder, 2012; Brown et al 2014; Idemaru et al., forthcoming) with the theoretical view that speakers employ multiple politeness strategies to ensure successful communication. Their results indeed demonstrate that multiple linguistic and non-linguistic features contribute to produce the intended meaning of politeness. This study attempts to advance these efforts further. I will use the same data analyzed in Idemaru et al. (forthcoming) to measure and analyze important acoustic features (pitch, intensity, voice quality) at critical regions within words or phrases. This study will yield a more accurate understanding of the phonetic basis for one of the most fundamental Japanese social cues – politeness.

Acoustic Sources of Accent in Second Language Japanese Speech

Presenter(s): Hayli Brown—Linguistics, Japanese

Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru

Session 1: Speech and Sound—Can you Hear Me?

This study extends previous findings on the perception of pitch accent in Japanese second language speech (L2) and further analyzes its effect on the word level in isolation . Previous research revealed that pitch accent is the strongest acoustic factor that affects how accented a speaker sounds
when speaking Japanese as an L2 . Analyzing this effect at the word level will inform us on where this accentedness is heaviest in a phrase . Japanese speech samples were collected from 20 American English speakers (10 speakers in both second and third year groups) studying Japanese . The L2 participants provided speech samples of 18 words both with and without a native speaker model . Pitch patterns 0 (LHH), 1 (HLL), and 3 (LHL) were examined in words that had three morae— units of time, which are given separate pitch accents to create a tonal pattern in Japanese . Native Japanese listeners (10 participants) rated the samples with regard to degrees of foreign accent . Words with Type 0 and Type 2 pitch accents were rated the highest for having a perceived foreign accent . Perceived foreign accentedness was also rated higher for the second year group of Japanese learners . Further research should be conducted to ascertain the exact acoustic or phonological motivations for these results, but the difference between English and Japanese intonation patterns is considered as one motivation in this study . With more research, the findings of this study may provide useful tools for better pronunciation teaching methods with the goal of achieving native-like fluency .