Motoko Ueyama

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Univesrity of Bologna Department of Interpreting and Translation

The book presents an extended investigation of how first language (L1) prosodic characteristics affect second language (L2) prosodic patterns in the production of the adult L2 speaker: i.e., prosodic transfer. Two L2 types are examined experimentally: L2 English produced by L1 Japanese speakers, and L2 Japanese produced by L1 English speakers. This...

Describes and analyzes the durational patterns of native Japanese speakers learning English, with a focus on two major prosodic effects: phrase-final lengthening and stress-timed shortening. To investigate the relative contribution of these effects, a production experiment was conducted, adapting the methodological framework of Beckman and Edwards...

Discrimination of Japanese consonant length (singleton/geminate) contrasts by native speakers of Italian differing in Japanese experience

Are emotions universal? Pioneering research suggested six basic universal emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. However, recent evidence shows cultural differences in emotional norms and preferences. Such differences extend to emotional speech, leading to potential misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication. One c...

Pronunciation has been a black hole in the L2 Japanese classroom on account of a lack of class time, teacher’s confidence, and consciousness of the need to teach pronunciation, among other reasons. The absence of pronunciation instruction is reported to result in fossilized pronunciation errors, communication problems, and learner frustration. With...

Pioneering research on L2 emotional speech provides evidence for crosslinguistic similarities and differences, but there is limited research at the production level. This study examines the production of emotional speech in both L1 and L2 of Italian learners of Japanese and L1 Japanese. We sought to find the acoustic characteristics of emotional sp...

Japanese intonation is largely determined based on the distribution of lexical pitch accents, which generally remain intact when embedded in larger sentences. Accordingly, most previous research on the L2 acquisition of Japanese accent has focused on words in isolation. The assumption appears to be that word-level findings would 'scale up' to sente...

Japanese is considered one of the most difficult foreign languages. A major factor is the complex Japanese orthography consisting of thousands of logographic kanji (adapted Chinese characters) and 105 phonetic kana (subdivided into hiragana and katakana). This situation leads to hardships in learning to read Japanese, discouraging students from tac...

It has been pointed out that prosody (e.g., pitch accent and intonation) is important to acquire Japanese pronunciation for fluid communication. Toward that end, the teaching of word accent alone is not sufficient, and research at the sentence level (i.e., how each word is realized in a sentence) is also necessary. The project reported on in this p...

Since the communicative approach gained popularity in the 1970s, drama-based activities such as role-plays have been widely used in a language-teaching setup. In the field of Japanese language education, Hashimoto (2009) proposed a drama-based approach to teaching pronunciation, arguing for its effectiveness in teaching para-linguistic characterist...

The world is growing faster and closer, leading to increasing demands in linguistic and cultural mediation among speakers of various languages. Japanese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, currently studied by approximately 3.4 million learners in 137 countries. Under the above circumstances, how can research make contributions...

Theater is a communication medium consisting of two dimensions: 1) actors or actresses communicate on the stage; 2）actors or actresses on the stage communicate with a live audience by creating a drama through dialogues. Since the dawn of the communicative approach, which sets communicative competence acquisition as a learnersʼ goal, gained populari...

Relative prominence distribution, one of the major factors characterizing speech rhythm, is largely determined not only by the position of word accent/stress (word accent, henceforth) but also by the treatment of the acoustic correlates involved in word accent production (e.g., duration, F0, amplitude). Languages differ in both aspects, and those d...

Despite its crucial role in speech communication, the tonal aspect of Japanese prosody has hardly been taught in a L2 Japanese classroom. This paper reports results of our experimental study in which the phonetic realization of lexically defined tonal patterns in L2 Japanese speech was examined, collecting data from three groups of learners of Japa...

This study compared native Italian (NI) and American English (NE) speakers' abilities to perceive Japanese phonemic length contrasts. Japanese has both vowel and consonant length contrasts, Italian has only consonant length contrast, and English has neither. The study examined to which extent the differential use of duration in their native languag...

The Web is a potentially unlimited source of linguistic data; however, commercial search engines are not the best way for linguists to gather data from it. In this paper, we present a procedure to build language corpora by crawling and post- processing Web data. We describe the construction of a very large Italian general-purpose Web corpus (almost...

The BootCaT toolkit (Baroni and Bernardini, 2004) is a suite of perl programs implementing a pro-cedure to bootstrap specialized corpora and terms from the web using minimal knowledge sources. In this paper, we report ongoing work in which we ap-ply the BootCaT procedure to a Japanese corpus and term extraction task in the hotel terminology do-main...

English and Japanese have a vowel length contrast between tense vs. lax, and long vs. short vowels, respectively. However, they differ in the magnitude of the duration contrast (larger in Japanese) and in the role of vowel quality in the production of the contrast (active only in English). How do these differences affect L2 English-L1 Japanese and...

Durational reduction of unstressed syllables is a characteristic of English rhythmic organization. This study investigated the durational patterns of unstressed vowels in the production of Japanese speakers of English, as a part of our on-going research on prosodic transfer from L1 to L2 phonetics. The results of our experiment showed a general ten...

The tonal contour of focus in English intonation is H*L−L% in declaratives and L*H−H% in interrogatives, within the framework developed by Pierrehumbert (1980). Consequently, L‐ or H‐ show low‐ or high‐plateau patterns, respectively. Japanese intonation does not permit such total deaccentuation after focus because of the need of preserving lexical...

This study analyzes the durational patterns of native Japanese speakers learning English, with a focus on the two major prosodic effects: phrase‐final lengthening and stress‐timed shortening. To investigate the significance of these effects, a production experiment was conducted, adapting the method of Beckman and Edwards [Papers in Laboratory Phon...