Chūkan gengo on'inron kenkyū - itariago bogowasha ni yoru nihongo pitchi akusento no chikaku to seisei no jikken kekka bunseki

本稿の目的は、イタリア人日本語学習者の中間言語の音声的・音韻論的特徴を分析し記 述することである。分析の際、日本語ピッチアクセントの知覚と生成という二つのパラメ ーターを手掛かりとし、2 種類の横断的調査を行った。まず、アクセントの知覚を分析す るための聴取実験であるが、概要は以下の通り。1)学習レベル別の 48 名の被験者に四つの アクセント型を含む無意味語のリストを聞かせ、アクセント核を記させる。2)アクセント 型別正答率の集計結果から、四つのアクセント型の難易度を推定する。3)学習レベル別の 正答率の推移の観察から、習得プロセスを解明する。次に、アクセントの生成に関しては、 学習レベル別の 20 名の被験者にアクセント核をつけた文を読ませ、その音声の録音結果を 音響音声学的に分析する。すなわち、ピッチ、インテンシティー、長さの三つのパラメー ターを測定し、学習レベル別の被験者がどのように音を強調するかを検証する。

The term interlanguage, introduced by Selinker in 1972, refers to an autonomous linguistic system evidenced when an adult second-language learner attempts to express meanings in the target language. The phonology of interlanguage investigates the phonetic and phonemic characteristics of this linguistic system, influenced both by the native and the target language, and attempts to determine the strategies of the learners in the process of acquiring the sounds of the second language. This paper aims to analyze and describe the phonetic characteristics of the interlanguage of Italian learners of Japanese. The production and perception of Japanese pitch accent have been chosen as parameters of investigation. I will describe the methodology and discuss findings of two longitudinal experiments. In the first experiment, conducted with 48 Italian learners, the perception of the pitch variation in single words has been analyzed. In particular I examined (1) the difficulty in perception of accent for the four accentual patterns, (2) the difficulty in perception of accent of words with unvoiced vowels, long vowels, moraic nasals and long consonants, (3) the difference in perception of accent of meaningless and meaningful words, (4) the relation between the perception of accent and the informant's proficiency level. In the second experiment I examined the strategies of Italian learners in producing Japanese pitch accent. The informants were asked to read words with the indication of the place of the accent. Through an acoustic analysis of the spectrogram it has been possible to determine the parameters (pitch, intensity, length) used to realize the prominence.