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Paper short abstract

Polish learners reliably distinguished Japanese word-medial plosives, but their phonetic cue use only partly matched native Japanese patterns. They showed similar closure-duration differences, stronger prevoicing in voiced stops, more frequent releases in voiced stops, and longer releases in voiceless stops.

Paper long abstract

Speech contrasts are rarely realized through a single acoustic cue, and similarities between a first and second language may facilitate learning without necessarily leading to fully native-like production. Japanese word-medial voiced and voiceless plosives differ in closure duration, closure voicing, and release realization. Polish shows similar differences in closure voicing and duration, although release patterns are not identical. From the perspective of the revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), this overlap may facilitate the production of Japanese medial voicing contrasts while allowing language-specific patterns to persist.

A controlled production experiment was conducted with 8 Polish learners of Japanese and 10 native Japanese speakers. Participants produced nine Japanese real-word minimal pairs contrasting in word-medial plosive voicing, with three pairs at each place of articulation and three repetitions per word. In total, 970 productions were analyzed. We examined closure duration, the proportion of the closure containing voicing, and release occurrence and duration using mixed-effects models.

Both groups produced longer closures for voiceless than for voiced plosives. The raw voiced–voiceless differences were similar, at approximately 35 ms for Japanese speakers and 31 ms for Polish learners, although the proportional contrast was smaller in the Polish group because their closures were longer overall. Closure voicing in intended voiced plosives was also broadly similar: voicing occupied 73% of the closure in Japanese and 76% in Polish, with no clear group difference in devoicing. A clearer difference emerged in release realization. Japanese voiced plosives frequently had no identifiable release, with an adjusted no-release probability of 67%, compared with 23% for Polish learners. Voiceless-plosive releases were also descriptively longer in the Polish group (34 vs. 17 ms), although this pattern did not remain reliable after correction.

Overall, Polish learners produced a clear Japanese voiced–voiceless contrast and showed broadly similar closure timing and closure voicing to native speakers, but differed in release realization. The findings suggest that cross-language similarity can support second language production while language-specific phonetic patterns remain.