What question did this study set out to answer?

This study investigates how Japanese listeners perceive English word-final consonants in different speech types. It aims to identify how acoustic cues affect their performance compared to American English listeners.

May 14, 2026

Influence of acoustic cues on Japanese listeners’ perception of place-of-articulation contrasts of English word-final consonants in connected speech by multiple speakers

Key Points

This study investigates how Japanese listeners perceive English word-final consonants in different speech types. It aims to identify how acoustic cues affect their performance compared to American English listeners.
Data collected from 62 Japanese listeners and 30 American English listeners.
Stimuli included clear and fast speech, presented in a three-alternative forced choice identification test.
Minimal triplets were used to analyze place contrasts in word-final stops.
Japanese listeners' correct response rate was significantly lower than that of American English listeners.
Fast speech significantly reduced performance for both language groups.
Variability in performance was noted by speaker for both groups, with distinct patterns observed in nasal stimuli.

Abstract

An extension of a previous study examining Japanese listeners’ perception of place contrasts of English word-final stops in connected speech (Ito, 2012) was carried out by increasing the number of speakers of the stimuli, from one to four. Stimuli embedded in a carrier sentence and produced in clear speech and in fast speech were presented in a three-alternative forced choice identification test, adopting minimal triplets (e.g., sip-sit-sick, bib-bid-big, dim-din-ding) followed by an adverb starting with /p/, /t/, or /k/. Correct response rates for 62 Japanese listeners were compared with those for 30 American English (AE) listeners. The following results replicated those of the previous study: Japanese listeners’ performance was significantly lower than AE listeners; Fast speech stimuli significantly lowered the performance by both language groups; Japanese listeners’ distinctly low performance on nasal stimuli in both speech types contrasted with AE listeners’ very high performance. The present study further revealed that the performances by both language groups significantly varied by speaker and that effects of acoustic cues on performance showed quite different patterns between Japanese and AE listeners in both oral (voiceless, voiced) and nasal stimuli, indicating different perceptual patterns of the two language groups.

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