Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Learning On Sentence Prosody In Japanese, Joanna Baldwin Clark

Linguistics Honors Projects

This study investigates the effect of learning on prosodic production competence in native English L2 speakers of Japanese. Intonation contour and speech rate as indicators of competency were examined. It was hypothesized that more experience with Japanese would lead to more native-like prosody. The study tested the production of fourteen L2 learners, ten non-learners and six native speakers. Participants recorded twenty-three sentences of Japanese. Acoustic data was analyzed for speech rate and fundamental frequency (F0). Results showed that experience is positively correlated with speech rate and not correlated with deviation from the Japanese mean intonation contour.