Taiwanese Learners’ Durational Patterns for Japanese Obstruent Geminates/Singletons and Adjacent Vowels 1

This study measured the durations of Japanese obstruent geminates/singletons and their adjacent vowels (V₁ and V₂) embedded in words repeatedly spoken by four intermediate-level Taiwanese learners of Japanese. The results indicated that the four learners were more or less at a native-like level in terms of geminate lengthening, but not in terms of the V₁/V₂ duration ratio. These findings suggest that for Chinese learners of Japanese, the learning of Japanese geminates consists of two stages: geminate/singleton phonemic contrast learning, followed by V₁/V₂ phonetic contrast learning. It is suggested that explicit instruction may be effective at the second stage.