| 研究実績の概要 |
We continued our exploration of the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of language rhythm, with the purpose of better understanding how to give effective feedback to learners of English as a second language. The rhythmical organization of language is such that speakers use the jaw (mouth) to provide a basic underlying rhythmical structure of their language, as they produce each syllable in the utterance. This rhythmical structure varies from language to language: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and French, for instance, tend to have increased syllable stress (implemented by increased jaw opening), at the end of phrases/utterances, and maybe also at the beginning of phrases, while English has a hierarchical organization such that each syllable has a specific value of stress, reflecting the varying amounts of jaw displacement in an utterance. For learning a second language, it is important to "retrain" articulatory mechanisms in order to produce the rhythmic pattern of the language they are trying to learn.
An important finding in this past year is that given laryngeal and supralaryngeal articulation are essentially independent, in order to better understand how to provide effective feedback to learners of a second language with regard to improving comprehensibility, jaw displacement patterns in each language must also be taken into account.
|
