A diagnostic test of pronunciation is developed for L2 learners of Japanese and administered to American and Chinese learners of Japanese. Results showed that Chinse students outperformed American students for almost all measures, especially rhythm and accent perception, and production errors on rhythm and accent were rated severely.
Good pronunciation is a necessary skill for 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 (Toki, 1994). Also L2 pronunciation in adulthood is characterized by a large degree of individual variation (Kartushina & Frauenfelder, 2014), and even a proficient learner may not attain native-like proficiency. This is because successful pronunciation requires the acquisition of multiple features such as segments, rhythms, pitch-accents and intonation in both perceptual and productive modes. Even so, very little classroom time is allocated for teaching pronunciation in Japanese (Matsuzaki 2016). For this reason, the present project aims at developing a diagnostic test of pronunciation with online lesson modules. Segmental and suprasegmental features that are found to be difficult for Chinese and English speaking leaners in previous studies were selected and three types of tests were developed: (1) the word identification test in which learners hear a conversation with a novel words and are asked to tell its spelling word, (2) the accent test in which they hear two or three words consecutively and tell whether they are the same or different, and (3) the production test which is a read-aloud task consisting of fifty sentences designed to test rhythm, segments, and accent. Thirty American and thirty Chinese learners of Japanese took the tests. The analysis of the perception test scores showed that English-speaking learners have more difficulty in perceiving Japanese accent and rhythm than Chinese learners, although they do not have a problem perceiving individual sounds. The production tests were rated in terms of foreign accentedness and comprehensibility. The results indicated errors on rhythm and accent results in low rating in foreign accentedness while fluency and segmental errors affected the rating of comprehensibility.
