Abstract:

This paper discusses the application of acoustical visualization in Japanese suprasegmental pronunciation teaching. Acoustical visualization, when applied in foreign language pronunciation teaching, could help students effectively integrate visual and auditory information, and thus enhance their understanding of abstract speech signals and phonological rules; the human-machine interaction also could improve the efficiency of pronunciation learning, and thus improve their self-monitoring ability. Based on this, the current paper first summarizes previous research findings of Japanese suprasegmental (including accent and sentence-medial and sentence-final intonation) acquisition by Chinese learners within the second language acquisition framework, and then provides concrete methods of teaching Japanese suprasegmental pronunciation to Chinese learners via observing and comparing acoustic parameters of speech sounds. At the end, it discusses the application value of using acoustical visualization in Japanese suprasegmental pronunciation teaching as well as its feasibility.

Key words: Acoustical visualization, pronunciation teaching, Japanese, accent, intonation