Systematic L1-L2 Comparison for Multiple L1-L2 Combinations to Predict Overall Difficulties in Learning Japanese Prosody

Japanese prosody is challenging for L2 Japanese speakers independently of their L1s, but the nature of the difficulties varies, depending on the learners' L1s. This is also the case for learning the two most salient phonological aspects of Japanese word-level prosody: i.e., phonemic length contrast and lexical accent. The goal of this study is to present some hypotheses on the expected difficulties in Japanese prosody learning, systematically comparing the target language (Japanese) with four Indo-European languages as learners' L1s (English, Italian, Spanish, French). First, for all the four L1-L2 combinations, we predicted L1 effects by considering not only the two aforementioned phonological aspects but also two phonetic factors, i.e., word stress/accent lengthening and vowel reduction. Furthermore, for each L1-L2 combination, the overall linguistic distance was calculated by scoring similarities and differences at both phonological and phonetic levels of word-level prosody. As a result, assuming a positive correlation between linguistic distance and learning difficulty, a difficulty hierarchy (from the easiest to the hardest) for learning Japanese lexical prosody emerged: Italian, Spanish, English and French. This prediction will be tested in future research.