Perception of Italian and Japanese consonant length by native speakers of Australian English and Italian: a pilot study

Kimiko Tsukada, Felicity Cox, John Hajek, Yukari Hirata

Research output: Contribution to journalConference paperpeer-review

Abstract

We examined the perception of Italian (IT) and Japanese (JP) consonant length contrasts (singleton vs geminate) in two groups of listeners: native speakers of IT and Australian English (OZ). Our preliminary results suggest that the IT listeners’ experience with singleton/geminate contrasts was more beneficial than the OZ listeners’ experience with vowel length contrasts in processing JP singleton and geminate consonants. Contrary to the previous literature, the OZ listeners identified stop length contrasts less accurately than fricative and affricate contrasts in both IT and JP. The IT listeners showed a manner effect only for JP with affricate length contrast being misperceived most.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)215-218
Number of pages4
JournalProceedings of the 15th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology
Publication statusPublished - 2014
EventAustralasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (15th : 2014) - Christchurch
Duration: 2 Dec 20145 Dec 2014

Keywords

  • cross-language speech perception
  • Italian (IT)
  • Japanese (JP)
  • singleton/geminate

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