Production of pitch accent by Swahili, Italian and German learners of Japanese

Despite its crucial role in speech communication, the tonal aspect of Japanese prosody has hardly been taught in a L2 Japanese classroom. This paper reports results of our experimental study in which the phonetic realization of lexically defined tonal patterns in L2 Japanese speech was examined, collecting data from three groups of learners of Japanese language whose native languages are typologically different in terms of both tonal and rhythmic aspects of prosody.