Why do Japanese speakers struggle with Japanese consonant length contrasts

Japanese speakers themselves can struggle with consonant length contrasts in their language primarily due to the subtle and complex nature of these contrasts in Japanese phonology.

Here are some key reasons:

• Japanese consonant length contrasts involve distinguishing short (singleton) consonants from long (geminate) consonants. This contrast is cued mainly by the duration of the consonant closure or constriction, which can be slight and difficult to perceive and produce consistently, even by native speakers. ^{1, 2}

• Japanese geminate consonants can be realized in two different acoustic ways depending on the consonant type, e.g., a silence or closure for stops vs. elongation for fricatives. This acoustic discrepancy can add difficulty for speakers to mentally represent and distinguish them. ^{3, 1}

• The perception and processing of these length contrasts may involve abstract phonological representations that differ from their exact acoustic profile, which can complicate perception even for native listeners. ¹

• Native Japanese speakers may also find it challenging to consistently maintain the contrast in fluent speech, as subtle phonotactic rules and vowel devoicing affect duration cues and perceptibility. ^{4, 5}

• Despite these difficulties, native Japanese speakers generally perform well in distinguishing consonant length, but the contrast remains difficult enough that it can be a challenge in language learning contexts and specific speech tasks. ^{6, 7}

In summary, the difficulty arises because Japanese consonant length contrasts rely on precise durational cues that can be acoustically variable and abstractly represented, making them tricky to perceive and produce consistently even by native speakers. ^{2, 1}

References

• Language specific listening of Japanese geminate consonants: a cross-linguistic study

• Tongue movement kinematics in long and short Japanese consonants.

• Language specific listening of Japanese geminate consonants: a cross-linguistic study

• Effects of phonotactic predictability on sensitivity to phonetic detail

• Durational Evidence That Tokyo Japanese Vowel Devoicing Is Not Gradient Reduction

• Perception of Japanese Consonant Length by Native Speakers of Korean Differing in Japanese Learning Experience

• Non-native Perception of Japanese Singleton/Geminate Contrasts: Comparison of Mandarin and Mongolian Speakers Differing in Japanese Experience

• Bilingual Advantage? Perception of the Japanese Consonant Length Contrast by Monolingual vs Bilingual Speakers of Mongolian

• CROSS-LANGUAGE PERCEPTION OF ITALIAN AND JAPANESE CONSONANT LENGTH CONTRASTS: A COMPARISON OF NATIVE ITALIAN LISTENERS WITH AND WITHOUT JAPANESE LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

• Optimal L2 Speech Perception: Native Speakers of English and Japanese Consonant Length Contrasts

• The lexical representation of second language length contrasts: Native English speakers learning Japanese

• Perception of consonant length in familiar and unfamiliar languages by native speakers of Mandarin, Italian and Japanese

• Cross-language Perception of the Japanese Singleton/Geminate Contrast: Case of Vietnamese Speakers With and Without Japanese Language Experience

• Perception of Italian and Japanese consonant length by native speakers of Australian English and Italian: A pilot study

• Training native English speakers to perceive Japanese length contrasts in word versus sentence contexts.

• Neural measures of a Japanese consonant length discrimination by Japanese and American English listeners: Effects of attention

• Can native Japanese listeners learn to differentiate /r–l/ on the basis of F3 onset frequency? – CORRIGENDUM

• Phoneme discrimination and mismatch negativity in English and Japanese speakers

• The Phonetics of Multiple Vowel Lengthening in Japanese

• Articulatory correlates of consonantal length contrasts: The case of Japanese mimetic geminates.

• Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

• Applying adaptive recognition of the learner’s vowel space to English pronunciation training of native speakers of Japanese

• Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: a first report.

• Durational Evidence That Tokyo Japanese Vowel Devoicing Is Not Gradient Reduction

• Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception and production

• Japanese Accent Pronunciation Error by Japanese Learners in Elementary and Intermediate Level