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Learnability issues in L2 Japanese: Prosody and ambiguity resolution

  • Masaaki Kamiya EMAIL logo and Priya Ananth
Published/Copyright: April 8, 2020
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Abstract

Previous studies in L1 research have claimed that native speakers are able to disambiguate scopally ambiguous sentences using prosodic cues. The present study seeks to investigate if the above claim is true in the case of learners of the Japanese language. We discovered that L2 Japanese learners had difficulty in mapping between scopally ambiguous interpretations and their appropriate prosodic patterns. We claim that these prosodic patterns were neither taught explicitly in class, nor are they available in the learners’ L1 knowledge base. Since they do not possess such knowledge in their long-term memory, the immediate cognitive context could not match with the incoming linguistic acoustic cues to give rise to salience. The present study suggests that L2 Japanese learners cannot learn accentual patterns implicitly, at least in a formal classroom set up, a conclusion corroborated by previous studies.

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at The Southeastern Association of Teachers of Japanese (SEATJ) annual conference in February 2018. We are grateful to the audience members for their feedback. We would like to thank Dr Amanda Brown and Mr Toto Sutarso who gave us advice on statistical analysis. We are also very thankful to the two anonymous reviewers and Dr Masahiko Minami for their invaluable suggestions.

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Published Online: 2020-04-08
Published in Print: 2020-05-27

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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