The present study aimed to examine phonetic and phonological learning with a specific focus on production of /r/ and /l/ and to identify the difficulty level of these approximants by defining /r/ and /l/ as easy, learnable or difficult items for Japanese learners of English. Acoustic analyses were conducted, where the third formant was measured for /r/ and /l/. The variables obtained from the analyses were submitted to three statistical tests, a cluster analysis, a multivariate analysis of variance and a discriminant analysis. The results showed that both approximants were difficult for Japanese learners to learn to produce. Despite the difficulty in learning them, it was also found that there was an individual preference about which approximant was learned faster. Some Japanese learners of English were learning /r/ faster than /l/ whereas others were learning /l/ faster than /r/. Further studies will be required to explore what creates these individual differences, and how positively the preference for learning /r/ or /l/ can affect the learning of both approximants.

研究論文