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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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This paper is based on research designed to improve the teaching and
learning of English intonation for Japanese EFL learners. Using experimental
analysis of fundamental frequency, this paper outlines three of the
weak points Japanese EFL learners have in English intonation: tonality,
tonicity and tone. (a) In terms of tonality, Japanese learners of English
tend to divide the text into unnecessarily many word groups. (b) In
terms of tonicity, they tend to place the nucleus on the last word
in each word group, regardless of the context, failing to deaccent
old information. This is due to interference from Japanese, in which
old information is not necessarily deaccented. (c) In terms of tone,
too, they tend to make errors caused by interference from Japanese.
These three weak points will be discussed using experimental Fx data
from audio recordings of the subjects.
Bibliographic reference. Taniguchi, Masaki (2003): "Intonational interference in Japanese learners' English", In ICPhS-15, 965-968.