Paper short abstract:

This study examined the relationship among perception, knowledge, monitoring, phonological memory, and production of Japanese lexical accent, and found that native language affected the difficulty of accent types and relationship among knowledge, monitoring ability, perception and production.

Paper long abstract:

Good pronunciation is a necessary skill for second language (L2) learners to have successful communication. Poor pronunciation raises processing demands on the listener, and native speakers experience comprehension difficulty, misunderstand the speaker's intention, or consider him/her incompetent (Hinofits & Bailey, 1980; Toki, 1994). For many native speakers, pronunciation is the easiest source of information to assess a non-native speaker's proficiency. Sato (1995) found that native speakers rely on suprasegmental features such as intonation and accent rather than segmental features when they evaluate non-native speakers' pronunciation. This finding triggered a number of studies that focus on the acquisition of Japanese accent (Ayusawa, 1998, 1999; Ayusawa, and Odaka, 1998; Katayama, 2008; Ogawara, 1997; Yamada, 1999; Yin, 2014, Yin et. al., 2015). Previous studies have found that the ability to perceive accent and the ability to evaluate and monitor one's own production is associated with production accuracy. However, the correlation between perception and production tends to remain at a moderate level, and so does the perception and monitoring. Also, most of the studies use a very small number of stimuli to obtain native judgment data.

Therefore, the present study attempts to fill this gap by investigating relative contribution of factors that are thought to associate with the production of Japanese lexical accent. One hundred-forty learners of Japanese were asked to fill in the demographic questionnaire and to take a series of online tests involving perception, knowledge, monitoring, phonological short-term memory, and production of Japanese lexical accent. The results show that accent knowledge, monitoring ability, and perception were correlated with production, but language proficiency or phonological short-term memory were not. Also, native language affected the strength of association with production and the difficulty of different accent types.