Paper short abstract:

This study examines the relationship between musical experience and attention to Japanese prosody through questionnaire data of Japanese language learners from Italy, Russia, China, and Vietnam between 2017 and 2019. The hypothesized relationship was somewhat supported.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese is classified as pitch-accented, and the sense of pitch is thus important in realizing speech. Although training methods and their effectiveness are being verified, there are individual differences in the sense of pitch, as well as individual differences in attention to Japanese prosody. Differences in the prosodic system of the learner’s native language and the learning environment of Japanese speech are possible causes, but it is also possible that the learner’s experience with instruction for musical instruments and vocal music (hereafter, “musical experience”) may also have an influence. Therefore, we conduct a preliminary study to determine the extent to which European (Italian, Russian) learners of Japanese whose mother tongue has a stress-accent system, and Asian (Chinese, Vietnamese) learners of Japanese whose mother tongues are tone languages pay attention to Japanese prosody when speaking Japanese, with a consideration of its relationship with their musical experience.

The questionnaires were conducted at universities in the above four countries between 2017 and 2019, and the analysis of data of 102 respondents (16 from Italy, 12 from Russia, 61 from China, and 13 from Vietnam) showed that most of the students in Italy and Russia (85.7%) paid attention to pitch accent when listening to Japanese spoken by native Japanese speakers, while most of the students in China and Vietnam (76.0%) learned the accent when learning new words. Additionally, 85.7% of the Italian and Russian respondents had musical experience (average duration, 5.2 years), while only 29.3% of the Chinese and Vietnamese students had musical experience (average duration, 1.2 years). Moreover, those who paid “no attention” to prosody had a shorter duration of musical experience than those who paid attention in both Europe and Asia, while those who looked up word accents in dictionaries tended to have a longer duration than the average for all participants. These results thus to some extent suggest a relationship between musical experience and attention to prosody.