Volume 82, Issue 6

We examined the perception of Japanese consonant length by three groups of Vietnamese speakers and a group of 10 Japanese speakers. Two of the Vietnamese groups consisted of learners of Japanese with one group participating in Vietnam ( n  = 17) and the other in Japan ( n  = 13). The third Vietnamese group consisted of 12 participants inexperienced in Japanese. Unlike Japanese, consonant length is non-contrastive in Vietnamese. Thus, we were interested in how different experience with Japanese may influence the perception of difficult Japanese contrasts. The overall mean discriminability in d -prime was 1.0, 1.9, 3.1 and 4.5 for the non-learner group, the learner group in Vietnam, the learner group in Japan and the native Japanese group, respectively. A clear difference between the two learner groups demonstrates learnability of Japanese consonant length for grownups. At the same time, the qualitative difference between the advanced learners and native Japanese speakers suggests genuine and persistent difficulty of Japanese consonant length. By providing additional empirical data beyond the segmental level, this study helps us to better evaluate the extent to which current theories of second language (L2) speech learning account for the acquisition of a wide range of L2 sounds by speakers from diverse first language backgrounds.

Connected speech, characterized by phonological variations such as contractions and elisions, poses unique challenges for second language learners, yet research on its perception in young EFL populations remains limited. This study examined English connected speech perception in 72 Chinese EFL children with varying phonological awareness (PA) levels through systematic manipulation of familiarity and salience of acoustic - phonetic and semantic cues. Results demonstrated concurrent activation of both cues, challenging the abstractionist model. Additionally, high PA levels correlated with superior perceptual accuracy and greater cue-weighting flexibility, albeit no significant difference was observed between high and low PA groups under conditions of low cue familiarity and salience. These findings suggest that PA is necessary but insufficient for connected speech perception. Instead, strategic cue weighting plays a vital role, highlighting that EFL instruction should develop young learners’ ability to flexibly utilize multiple cues.

This study examined the acoustic profiles of five basic emotions in American English and Mandarin Chinese using a big data approach. A total of 6,373 features were extracted using the openSMILE toolkit, and key discriminative features were identified through random forest classification. In American English, vocal emotions were primarily conveyed through pitch-related features, while Mandarin Chinese, shaped by its tonal constraints, relied more on spectral and voice quality cues, including MFCCs, HNR, and shimmer. Linear mixed-effects models confirmed significant effects of emotion on the top-ranked features, and Cohen’s d further supported distinct acoustic profiles for each emotion. K-means clustering revealed both categorical groupings and dimensional overlaps, such as the clustering of high-arousal emotions like happy and surprised, and low-arousal emotions like sad and neutral. These results suggest that vocal emotion expression is shaped by language-specific prosodic systems, as well as by both discrete emotion categories and continuous affective dimensions, supporting an integrated model of emotional prosody.

Since cheering has not yet been systematically investigated from a phonetic perspective, this study explores its acoustic characteristics by focusing on a specific type of cheering: inciting calls directed at individual runners during long-distance races, using their names. We investigate its prosodic realization through an experimental approach. We present findings from a production study with recordings in the lab comparing cheering utterances to neutral speech. 30 native speakers of German were asked to cheer on an individual marathon runner in a sporting event shown in a video by calling out his or her name (1–5 syllables). For reasons of comparison, the participants also produced the same names in isolation and carrier sentences. Our results reveal four different cheering patterns: (i) separately produced items of similar duration, (ii) division of items into syllables, (iii) mixed pattern of (i) and (ii), and finally (iv) a singing pattern, again mixed with (i) and (ii). When cheering for the marathon runners, participants used a higher fundamental frequency, a wider F0 range, longer item duration, slower speech rates, and increased intensity.