The conflation of /l/ and /r/: New Zealand perceptions of Japanese-accented English

ABSTRACT

As a case study of non-linguists’ perceptions of accent, this paper investigates how accurately and on what basis Japanese-accented English (JAE) is discernible from other L2 varieties of English in New Zealand (NZ). The paper sheds light on how a feature salient in speech is associated with the perceived sociolinguistic identity of speakers. An analysis of a test with local university students demonstrates that JAE had the highest identification rate among six L2 English accents and that the lack of contrast between English /l/ and /r/ was the most crucial to their identification of major segmental features previously noted as characteristic of JAE. Although the participants also frequently perceived the /l/–/r/ conflation in Cantonese- and Korean-accented speakers, they were more likely to assume that the accent was Japanese rather than any other L2 accent. The conflation served as an indexical cue of JAE in NZ society at the beginning of this century because of New Zealanders’ extensive contact with Japanese visitors and familiarity with the Japanese language in secondary education, along with ESL reference books’ frequent reference to this feature as peculiar to JAE. The study confirms the applicability of the concept of indexicality to L2 accent investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Accent identification
• enregisterment
• indexicality
• Japanese accent
• /l/ and /r/

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robert McKenzie for his helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful for constructive and valuable comments from two anonymous Language Awareness reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Because their L2 accents were judged to be very slight or atypical by their compatriots, two early bilinguals were excluded from the present analysis. However, the authenticity of bilingual Reader 2's accent was rather self-styled because of the lack of judges with the same language background.

2. In a similar vein, Watanabe (2008) reported in another component of the comprehensive research that a male JAE speakers’ provenance was correctly identified at a high rate by 44.6% of the judges, two-thirds of whom overlapped with the current participants.

3. Native speakers’ high sensitivity to non-native speech has been verified in a number of laboratory experiments. Flege (1984) found that L1 English speakers could detect non-native divergence in one syllable or in the first 30 ms of /t/ production. Munro et al. (2010) demonstrated that non-native production was distinguishable from native production when words were played back backwards and randomly spliced, as long as certain suprasegmental cues were maintained.

4. Whether a low voice should be considered a purely paralinguistic feature or a suprasegmental property in an extended sense remains a topic of debate.

5. The question of whether /l/ tends to be confused with /r/ or vice versa in JAE has yet to be answered: Dougill (2008, p. 20) implied that /l/ is likely to be perceived as /r/, as in the instance of ‘have a present fright’ (as said by a Japanese flight attendant), whereas Jenkins (2000, p. 36) made the opposite claim, citing the example of ‘don lies a fizz’ (i.e., don't rise [raise] the fees).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yutai Watanabe

Yutai Watanabe is a professor of variationist sociolinguistics at Hosei University, Japan. His research interests lie in how varieties of L2-accented English are perceived and evaluated in the Inner and Expanding Circles. His work on accent attitudes while a visiting scholar in New Zealand has appeared in Te Reo (2008) and other publications.