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Consonant SubstitutionPatterns in JapaneseSpeakers’ English
Takehiko Makino
(Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan)
mackinaw@tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp
Accents 2008: II International conferenceon native and non-native accents of EnglishUniversity Conference Centre, Łódź,Poland12-14 December 2008
1. Introduction
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Consonants are one of the mostdifficult parts of Englishpronunciation for Japanesespeakers.
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This obviously reflects thedifference between theconsonant systems of the twolanguages: Japanese has onlyfourteen consonant phonemeswhile American English has
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It is too simplistic to assume that Japanese speakers just reduce Englishconsonants to their owncounterparts.
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We all know of “common errors,” butthey have been observed onlyinformally and the whole picture issomething up in the air.
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This is understandable because asystematic study would have requiredlarge-scale databases or corpora of Japanese learners’ Englishpronunciation.
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