Stimulus-related effects on the perception of syllables in second-language speech

Syllables exist in most, if not all, languages as a basic unit of prosodic and rhythmic structure. For native English speakers, the number of syllables a given word contains is often intuitively clear (e.g., Liberman et al., 1974). This is so even though it has been extremely difficult to agree on a phonetic definition of syllables (Ohala, 1990). While syllables are found in all languages, at the same time, its structure shows considerable language-specific variation. Because of this, native-speaker intuitions about the number of syllables in a word are not likely to be shared by non-native speakers. In fact, it is known that perception and production of syllables in a second language (L2) with relatively complex syllable structure, such as English, is difficult for native speakers of a language with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese (Tarone, 1980; Tajima et al., 2003; Otake et al., 1996; Dupoux et al., 1999). Recently, a series of studies have been carried out to examine the ability of native Japanese listeners to perceive syllables in spoken English words by using a syllablecounting task in which listeners identify the number of syllables in spoken English words (Erickson et al., 1999; Tajima and Erickson, 2001; Tajima et al., 2002). The