การวิเคราะห์พฤติกรรมอสมมาตรในการออกเสียง ภาษาที่สองตามแนวทฤษฎีอุตมผล: กรณีศึกษาการออกเสียง /N/ ในภาษาญี่ปุ่นของผู้เรียนชาวไทย

Abstract

Markedness in place of articulation can be found in different languages of the world. However, most research tends to focus on markedness in first language alone. de Lacy (2006) proposes an analysis using the Optimality Theory (OT) framework and states that the markedness phenomena arises from the interaction of markedness constraints that reflect the following universal hierarchy of markedness of place of articulation: dorsal > labial > coronal. The present study aims to test if constraints proposed by de Lacy (2006) can account for speech production in a second language. Production of the Japanese phoneme /N/ by Thai learners was used as a case study. Japanese /N/ always assimilates with the following segment in terms of place of articulation. Therefore, the production of /N/ that is not assimilated by Thai learners should reveal their constraints ranking. In the experiment, fifteen participants were instructed to read target words in carrier sentences. All target words were bi-syllabic words, with the first syllable ending with /N/ while the onset of the second syllable was [m], [n], or [ŋ]. The words were not real words in Japanese. Results showed that the participants produced /N/ as assimilated and non-assimilated. The analysis reveals that constraints proposed by de Lacy (2006) can account for data found in this study. Nonetheless, some limitations exist. It must be assumed that if the segment following /N/ has the coronal feature, the input is always [ŋ_cor], and if the segment following /N/ is labial, the input is /n_lab/ or /ŋ_lab/ while the output is [n_lab] or [ŋ_lab], respectively.