Perception and Processing of English Prosody by Japanese Learners of English

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02480
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Kobe University
• Principal Investigator: Tateishi (Mizuguchi) Shinobu (水口志乃扶) 神戸大学, 国際文化学研究科, 教授 (00157489)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): Pinter Gabor 神戸大学, 大学教育推進機構, 准教授 (30580691) ; 立石 浩一 神戸女学院大学, 文学部, 教授 (70291789) ; 林 良子 神戸大学, 国際文化学研究科, 教授 (20347785)
• Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha): NOTA Yukiko ATR Promotions, 脳活動イメージングセンタ, 研究員 (60374104)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: フォーカス / プロソディ / 産出 / 知覚 / 脳内処理

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study investigates production, perception and processing of semantic notion of contrastive focus. Previous studies show that processing of L1(i.e. mother tongue) focus and that of L2 (i.e. non-mother tongue) are different. Our study aims to see whether the claims by previous analyses apply to L1 Japanese/L2 Englsih. Our sutdy consists of two steps; first we have conducted production and perception experiments by L1 Japanese/L2 English. Second we conducted a processing experiment by using fMRI. Our findings are (i) Japanese focus is more difficult to perceive than English focus, even to L1 Japanese, (ii) Processing of contrastive focus is different between English and Japanese.
We did several oral presentations at international conferences, and published papers. We also uploaded our papers to Research Gate, and our papers have been downloaded more than 160 times, as of April 2018.

Free Research Field

言語学