中国語母語話者を対象とした日本語の複合語アクセントの指導法 : VT法の指導効果をめぐって

Accent errors of Chinese speakers learning Japanese are caused by various factors: negative interference of L1, transfer in language training, overgeneralization, etc. Among others, different functions of tonal accents between Chinese and Japanese are a major source of the errors. Chinese four tonal accents, which are constant at the phrasal level, have the distinctive functions of identifying the meaning of words with the same phonemic representation. On the other hand, Japanese accents have not only this distinctive function but also the syntactic one: Japanese accents delimit the boundary of a syntactic phrase or a compound word so that they vary from context to context (only one low-high pitch in a compound). Due to this difference, Chinese learners tend to pronounce each minimal word with separate accent patterns. Even advanced learners sometimes produce wrong accent patterns since they are not explicitly taught compound word accent rules. Therefore, a more effective instruction for the prosody in Japanese should be developed. In this paper, we investigate a teaching method of Japanese compound accents in terms of the Verbotonal method (VT) advocated by Petar Guberina. The VT method uses the body movement in language learning focusing on the global sound-meaning structure and the context in which phonetic, rhythmic and intonational outputs are evaluated. Based on previous studies of the VT method in Japanese teaching, we designed an experiment to evaluate effects of an explicit instruction of Japanese compound accents. We selected 15 Japanese words that have two or three moras and various accent patterns (initial accent, accent on the second syllable, unaccented flat pattern etc.) and created 36 compound words without semantic associations by means of the 15 words ("sora" (sky) + "atama" (head) --> "sora'atama" (sky-head)). Participants were 15 Chinese native speakers learning Japanese. They were divided into two groups. At first, the two groups were shown the 51 Japanese words (15 single words and 36 compou