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Paper short abstract

Slovenian has largely lost phonemic vowel length and use duration suprasegmentally to mark stress. Slovenian learners of Japanese master long–short contrasts but systematically reinterpret certain trimoraic CV–CV–R words as CV–R–CV, demonstrating prosodic transfer affecting L2 segmental structure.

Paper long abstract

In most Slovene dialects, vowel length no longer functions as a phonemic feature at the segmental level. The historical long–short contrast has been lost, and vowel duration is instead used at the suprasegmental level to cue stress placement and accentual prominence.

In contrast, Japanese encodes vowel length phonemically, and minimal pairs such as 通る tōru ‘pass by’ and 取る toru ‘take’ illustrate that vowel duration is contrastive at the moraic level and independent of stress or accent placement. Slovenian learners of Japanese generally acquire this contrast successfully and produce phonemic vowel length accurately in most lexical contexts.

However, a systematic deviation has been observed at the beginner level in the production of certain disyllabic, trimoraic Japanese words containing a sequence of identical vowels in the second syllable (CV–CV–R). Based on both controlled and spontaneous speech data, these forms are occasionally realized as CV–R–CV, yielding outputs that preserve the overall mora count but alter the mora–segment association. Crucially, this reordering occurs only under specific prosodic conditions, namely when the initial mora lacks lexical pitch accent. Thus, the target form 旅行 ryokō ‘a trip’ may surface as [rjoːko], rendering it homophonous with the female given name Ryōko.

This pattern suggests a reanalysis of L2 Japanese vowel length as a suprasegmental rather than a segmental property. The study systematically examines the influence of Slovene accentual representations on this non-target-like pronunciation and argues that learners reinterpret the long vowel not as a bimoraic vowel linked to a single syllabic nucleus, but as a prosodic lengthening effect associated with the most prominent unit in the word. This reinterpretation reflects transfer from the Slovene prosodic system, in which durational cues are systematically tied to stress rather than lexically specified at the segmental level.

The findings demonstrate that suprasegmental interference may give rise to non-target-like segmental outputs, even in cases where learners appear to have acquired the relevant contrast. Pedagogically, these findings underscore the need to explicitly represent moraic structure in teaching Japanese pronunciation to Slovene learners.

Keywords: vowel length, moraic structure, suprasegmental transfer, L2 phonological acquisition, Slovene–Japanese prosodic interference