The Acquisition of Japanese Vowel Length Contrast by Indonesian Native Speakers: Evidence from Perception and Production

Abstract

This research investigated the acquisition of long and short vowels and pitch accents through perception, sentence reading, and conversational discourse of the Japanese language by 20 Indonesian speakers. They made few errors in listening to short vowels, however, many errors in long one, and final positioning was very difficult. Indonesians use pitch change as a source of information in long vowel recognition. While reading they made few errors in pronouncing long and short vowels as they read it consciously. In natural discourse, they committed errors in all middle, initial, final positions. In both reading and natural discourse, they pronounced long vowels without any pitch change.