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When learning a foreign language at first, people are usually affected by their native languages or familiar ones, taking its phonologic features into the new one and consequently it leads to misuse or misunderstanding. Phenomenon precedent is also common in learning Japanese. There are “aspirate plosives” and “unaspirate plosives” in Chinese (Taiwanese inclusive), and both of them are regarded as different phonemes, but however, they are just regarded as allophones of the same phoneme in Japanese. Additionally, “voiced plosives” which exist in Japanese do not exist in Chinese. According to the reasons above, there are some obstacles of learning Japanese plosives to Taiwanese learners.
This thesis entitled “Perception of A Japanese Plosives in Taiwanese Learners” researched on the learning difficulty, confusions and other problems of Japanese plosives when Taiwanese learners encounter.
The followings are the main issues:
1. Whether native language has effect on learning
plosives.
2. Whether Japanese proficiency has effect on learning
plosives.
The percept experiment was hold in National Kaohsiung first university of science and technology, April 2010 and 40 college students were subjects. Experimental projects consisted of Japanese vocabulary containing unaspirate plosives (/p/, /t/, /k/) and aspirate plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) in prefixes or in segments respectively. Words chose were the same accented minimal pair as possible, for example: 「きせい(kiseii )」and「ぎせい(giseii)」or 「ぎんか(ginka)」and「ぎんが(ginga)」. I played the sound of experimental projects and let subjects to judge them voiceless plosives or voiced plosives and recorded the results into experimental papers.
From the results of the experiment, to Taiwanese learners, native language has few things to do with judging plosives; however, Japanese proficiency has something to do with it! According to the results, there are two conclusions. One is that references usually indicating that “It’s more advantageous to learn Japanese for people who speak Taiwanese.” discord with the results of the experiment. The other, the ability of judging plosives in Japanese can be improved by constant practice.
In this thesis, I attempt to analyze whether different speaking environments has effect on plosives to people whose native language is Chinese or Taiwanese. The outcome shows that speaking environment has greater influence on judging plosives than native language does.
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