2010 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
The Background of Fluency Disorders : Language Universality and Diversity
| Project/Area Number |
20520352
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Linguistics
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| Research Institution | Toyohashi University of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
UJIHIRA Akira Toyohashi University of Technology, 総合教育院, 教授 (10334012)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2008 – 2010
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| Keywords | 音韻単位 / 発話の非流暢性 / 中間言語 / 吃音者 / 語の繰り返し |
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| Research Abstract |
There are three results of the study on disfluencies. The first one is elucidation of phonological pattern underlying inter language speech. In the speech a syllable takes on the role of acting as the universal phonological unit. The novices of Japanese learners, English, Chinese and Korean, substitute a syllable for the dominant phonological unit of the mother tongue in their Japanese speech. On the other hand the advanced leaners' dominant phonological units are morae or those of their mother tongues.
The second one is illumination of a common tendency of stuttering between Japanese (Keihan dialect) and Chinese (Beijing dialect). The stutterers produce disfluency adhering to the next prosodic marker to the loci of disfluency. The marker is the descending pitch. In the other words, it is the accent nucleus in Japanese and No.4 tone in Chinese. The finding is based on statistical analysis of connected speech samples in Japanese and Chinese.
The third one is the suggestion of making a clear distinction between stuttering and not stuttering with the detailed investigation of language diversity. The whole word repetition has been the theme of discussions whether it is a symptom of stuttering or not. Cooperating with Prof.Peter Howell (University College London), it was shown that the stutterers in English create many whole word repetitions but the stutterers in Japanese don't do many. So the whole word repetition is not always a sign of stuttering. This conclusion is based on the accumulation of contrastive study of Japanese and English stuttering, and the difference of morphological and syntactic structures between Japanese and English.
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