This article reports an experiment to test whether Japanese and English speakers vary their fundamental frequency (f0) range as a function of the language spoken. Speech samples of Japanese-(American) English simultaneous bilinguals (5 males, 5 females; all undergraduates at UC Berkeley) performing comparable reading tasks in their two native languages were analysed. The study builds on a relatively new approach to measuring f0 range that computes its high and low points from tonal targets in the intonational phonology. Unlike in most previous studies where f0 range is traditionally treated as a one-dimensional measure, f0 range in this study is measured along two quasi-independent dimensions: level and span. Findings revealed statistically significant crosslanguage differences between Japanese and English in both dimensions. This provides new insights into the relation between prosodic structure and f0 range in these two typologically different prosodic systems.

The objective of the present study was to investigate (1) whether, and to what degree, late bilinguals of different L1 backgrounds are comparable to native speakers in the phonetic implementation of tonal targets in their L2, (2) whether they exhibit general patterns of acquisition irrespective of the typological closeness of their L1 to their L2, and (3) whether learners' choice of accent contours and the alignment of the high tone (H*) proceed in parallel with proficiency in the L2. More specifically, we examined the acquisition of the nuclear contour composition and the H* alignment of the American English (L)H*L-(i.e. pitch accent and boundary tone combination) in initial-stressed and final-stressed words by Japanese and Spanish late bilingual speakers at varying proficiency levels in American English. Results suggest that the L1 Spanish speakers were more comparable than the L1 Japanese speakers to the native English speakers in the phonological aspect of intonation (choice of pitch accent contour). In terms of peak alignment, we found that the late bilinguals generally tended to realise significantly later alignment than the native speakers, although the precise manifestation of this varied according to the L1 background of speakers and the stress pattern of words.

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This study examines whether Japanese native (L1) listeners can implicitly learn stress pattern regularities, not present in their L1, after a brief auditory exposure. In the exposure phase, the participants listened to and repeated words bearing stress patterned after Latin, but with a highly restricted consonant inventory. They performed a judgment task designed to test whether they had learned the relevant stress pattern regularities from the brief listening experience. We assessed participants’ awareness of the inherent stress regularities by analyzing confidence in making decisions and by verbal report. Results suggest that although participants remained unaware of the underlying stress regularities they performed significantly above chance in endorsing correctly stressed novel items even when they claimed to be guessing. In addition, there was no difference in confidence between correct and incorrect judgments. These results suggest that brief exposure resulted in implicit knowledge of abstract stress assignment rules. However, participants rejected correctly stressed words that contained consonants that were not present in the test phase. On the basis of this finding, we speculate that in the acquisition of second language phonology, a violation at the segmental level may be deemed more costly than a violation in the prosodic domain.

Adults are known to have difficulties acquiring suprasegmental speech that involves pitch (f0) in a second language (L2) (Graham & Post, 2018; Hirata, 2015; Wang, Spence, Jongman & Sereno, 1999; Wong & Perrachione, 2007). Previous research has suggested that the perceived similarity between L1 and L2 phonology may influence how easily segmental speech is acquired, but this notion of ‘similarity’ may also apply to suprasegmental speech (So & Best, 2010; Wu, Munro & Wang, 2014). In this paper, the L2 acquisition of Japanese lexical pitch was assessed under a ‘Suprasegmental Similarity Account’, which is a theoretical framework inspired by previous models of segmental and suprasegmental speech (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, 1995; Mennen, 2015) to account for the L2 acquisition of word prosody. Eight adult native speakers of Japanese and eight adult English-native advanced learners of Japanese participated in a perception and production study of Japanese lexical pitch patterns. Both groups performed similarly in perception, but non-native speakers performed significantly worse in production, particularly for ‘unaccented’ Low–High–High patterns. These findings are discussed in light of the ‘Suprasegmental Similarity Account’.