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Effects of first language prosodic features on English lexical stress perception: A case of Japanese speakers

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Abstract

Second language (L2) learners often struggle to perceive nonnative prosodic contrasts. Choi et al. (2019) found that Cantonese–English bilinguals outperformed L1 English listeners in English stress perception, due to L1 experience with F0 distinctions. Japanese, as a pitch-accent language, also encodes contrasts through H–L/L–H patterns. This study examines whether Japanese learners of English show comparable sensitivity to English stress. Twenty-five learners and thirteen L1 English speakers completed an AX discrimination task (600 ms interval) listening to two consecutive productions of the same word by male and female speakers and judging whether the stress patterns were the same or different. Stimuli included real and pseudo words under three cue conditions (F0-only, duration-intensity-only, all-cues). Generalized linear mixed-effects models revealed that accuracy significantly declined for male→female order in same trials, particularly for pseudowords, with a similar tendency in L1 English speakers, highlighting language-specific and general auditory constraints in prosodic perception.

Keywords: lexical stress, perception, pronunciation, second language, pitch accent, prosody, L1 transfer, normalization

How to Cite:

Narita, M., & Ono, Y. (2026). Effects of first language prosodic features on English lexical stress perception: A case of Japanese speakers. In P. Trofimovich, A. Bodea, T.-N. N. Le, R. Suzuki, & C. Teló (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (pp. 1–13). Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, October 2025. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.21327