An acoustic and articulatory study on the acquisition of Japanese plosive consonants by native Standard Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese

Standard Chinese is an aspirating language, whereas Japanese, though often lacking prevoicing in word-initial position, is classified as a voicing language. It is often said that native Standard Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese substitute the voiced–voiceless contrast in Japanese with an unaspirated–aspirated contrast, but the articulatory mechanisms underlying this tendency remain unclear. This study recorded the production of plosive consonants in both Chinese and Japanese by native Standard Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese, while simultaneously capturing tongue movements using an ultrasound system. Through this approach, the acquisition of Japanese plosives by native Standard Chinese speakers was investigated from both acoustic and articulatory perspectives. The results showed that although there was inter-speaker variation in the presence of prevoicing, most learners exhibited tongue contours at the point of maximal constriction that reflected patterns similar to those of native Japanese speakers in differentiating voiced and voiceless consonants. In the analysis of vowel F1-F2 values, all speakers showed somewhat distinct distributions between Japanese and Chinese, but the relationship between these distributions and the differences in place of articulation of stop consonants in the two languages requires further investigation.