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Paper short abstract

This study shows that, despite the absence of length distinction in Polish, Polish speakers can produce closure-duration contrasts in Japanese word-medial plosives, highlighting the role of language-specific phonetic experience in second language cue acquisition.

Paper long abstract

Japanese native speakers rely heavily on closure duration as a key acoustic cue in both the production and perception of word-medial plosive voicing contrasts. In contrast, Polish lacks a phonemic length distinction, and previous studies have shown that Polish speakers experience difficulty acquiring temporally based contrasts, such as pre-fortis clipping in English. This background raises the question of whether Polish speakers are able to acquire and implement the temporal cues required for Japanese word-medial voicing contrasts. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether Polish native speakers can produce categorical closure-duration differences between voiced and voiceless Japanese word-medial plosives, with English and Chinese learners included as reference groups for cross-linguistic comparison.

A controlled recording experiment was conducted with 8 Polish, 10 Japanese, 10 Chinese, and 4 English speakers. Participants produced nine real-word minimal pairs contrasting in word-medial plosive voicing (three pairs for each place of articulation), embedded in a carrier sentence. All non-native participants were advanced learners of Japanese. Acoustic analyses focused on voicing realization and closure duration in order to assess both the presence of categorical contrasts and the magnitude of temporal differences between voiced and voiceless plosives.

The results show that Polish native speakers consistently produced clear between-category voicing distinctions in Japanese word-medial plosives. Importantly, they were also able to realize systematic closure-duration differences for most plosive pairs. The magnitude of these temporal contrasts was comparable to that observed in native Japanese speakers, though smaller than those produced by English speakers. Chinese speakers, by contrast, showed limited evidence of reliable closure-duration differences across most plosive pairs. Additional results from detailed acoustic analyses, including voice onset time and burst-related measures, will also be presented.

Taken together, these findings suggest that Polish speakers can acquire the temporal implementation of Japanese voicing contrasts despite the absence of phonemic length distinctions in their native language. The study highlights the role of language-specific phonetic experience in second-language speech production and provides detailed acoustic evidence for cross-linguistic differences in cue acquisition.