ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024
ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024

Perception of Voicing Contrast of Japanese Word-Medial Plosives by Japanese and Chinese Listeners

Yixuan Huang, Mariko Kondo

This study investigates the roles of Voice Onset Time (VOT) and closure duration on the perception of voicing contrast of Japanese word-medial plosives by native speakers of Japanese and Chinese. An identification test of voiced and voiceless plosives was conducted using resynthesized stimuli that varied in VOT and closure duration. Twenty native Chinese speakers and fourteen native Japanese speakers participated in the study. The results showed different perceptual patterns of voicing between native speakers of Japanese and Chinese. For native Japanese speakers, closure duration strongly interacted with VOT. In general, longer closure duration tended to be a cue for voicelessness. A negative VOT of -40 ms did not signal 100% voiced responses, whereas a short closure duration of 10 ms signaled almost 100% voiced responses. Neither VOT nor closure duration affected the identification of native Chinese speakers, who gave predominantly voiced responses across all stimuli. The inability of native Chinese speakers to discriminate closure duration differences may explain their poor performance in identifying Japanese word-medial plosives. Overall, this study highlights the importance of closure duration in discriminating the voicing of Japanese word-medial plosives. It also suggests that closure duration should be used to develop perceptual training materials for plosive voicing discrimination for Chinese learners of Japanese.