HL2C-SLLAT Seminar: Takayuki Nagamine (Lancaster)

Title: Spatiotemporal dynamics in second language speech production: tackling the “Japanese /r/ and /l/ problem”

Presenter(s): Takayuki Nagamine (Lancaster)

Date: Wednesday, June 12, 2024, 12pm to 1pm

How to join: The seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List or to the SLLAT mailing list to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

About: This is a joint event, co-organized by the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and the Second Language Learning and Teaching (SLLAT) Research Group.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will present two studies of acoustic and articulatory phonetics where I consider why first-language (L1) Japanese speakers have difficulty in accurately producing their second-language (L2) English /l/ and /ɹ/ from the perspective of coarticulation (i.e., how a consonant and a vowel influence each other). Specifically, I consider how L1 Japanese speakers produce word-initial liquid-vowel sequence (e.g., leap, rap) by investigating time-varying changes in acoustic signals (Study 1*) and time-varying changes in tongue shape based on ultrasound data (Study 2). Results from these two studies commonly indicate that L1 Japanese speakers exhibit a greater variability in English liquid production as a function of vowel contexts compared to L1 English speakers, suggesting a lack of active control in the back of the tongue. I argue that dynamic analyses could offer new accounts of why certain L2 sounds are harder to produce in L2 speech production.

*Nagamine, T. (2024). Formant dynamics in second language speech: Japanese speakers’ production of English liquids. The Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 155(1), 479-495. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0024351