UNIVERSITY OF SAN CARLOS

DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

GRADUATE SCHOOL
LING 600

Adult speakers of one language usually find it difficult to produce the sounds of a
foreign language that are not present in their native language. There are numerous
reasons for this, including the fact that adults lose articulatory flexibility after long
years of producing only the speech sounds of their own language. A classic example
of this is the general difficulty that native Japanese speakers have in producing
many English sounds.

Here is a list of some difficulties:

No // sound is found in Japanese and /a/ is often substituted for //.
No /f/ sound exists in Japanese. The distinction between /f/ and /h/ is often
lost.
There is no /v/ in Japanese and /v/ is often confused with /b/.
There are no // or / / sounds in Japanese. /s/ is substituted for // and
/z/ for / /.

INSTRUCTIONS:
A. Transcribe the words listed below as a native Japanese person might produce
them.
1. lice
2. shack
3. car
4. five
5. vest
6. play
7. hold
8. bale
9. think
10. hive
11. vale
12. sink
13. breathe
14. fold
15. best
16. breeze
17. pray
18. rice

Submission of the paper is on _________________.

Source: Rowe, B. and Levine, D. (2012). A Concise Introduction to Linguistics.

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