Effects of Online Repetition Practice with Animated Visual Aid on the Acquisition of Japanese Pitch Accent and Special Moras

Errors in pitch accent and special moras in Japanese can lead to miscommunication, and it is important to practice producing these at an early stage of the language learning process. However, pronunciation practice is often dismissed in the classroom due to time constraints and lack of systematic materials (Taniguchi, 1991; Macdonald, 2002, Shibata, 2015). From these reasons, an online pronunciation practice material was developed. This preliminary study examined the effectiveness of the online repetition practice and then investigated the effectiveness of the animated visual aid. The study applied a pre post test research design and recruited 6 participants from a first-year Japanese language course. They were randomly divided into three practice groups and a control group; 1) video + visual aid practice group, 2) visual aid only practice group, 3) video only practice group, and 4) control group. The visual aid in this research modeled a “karaoke” system, where each mora in the word appears at the same time as when that mora is pronounced, and also indicates the high and low Suzuki, N & Miyamoto, M. Purdue Languages and Cultures Conference March, 2016 2 pitch accent for each mora. The whole process was completed within 30-minutes. The descriptive analysis result showed that online repetition practice using the “karaoke” model visual aid has a positive effect on short-term pitch accent production, but not on the accurate production of special moras. Future studies are needed to investigate whether long-term online repetition practice using this visual aid could lead to learners’ accurate special moras production and the retention of acquired pitch accent.