Vietnamese speakers’ mispronunciation of Japanese singleton and geminate stops

Vietnamese speakers’ mispronunciations of Japanese singleton and geminate stops were identified using the category boundary of the stops pronounced by native Japanese speakers. To clarify the characteristics of the Vietnamese speakers’ mispronunciations, their speech segment durations were analyzed. In comparison with native Japanese speakers’ correct pronunciations, Vietnamese speakers mispronounced a singleton stop with a longer closure and a shorter preceding consonant-vowel segment, whereas they mispronounced a geminate stop with a shorter closure and a longer following consonant-vowel segment. These results were consistent with the findings of Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Thai speakers in previous studies, suggesting that non-native speakers may have a common tendency to have inadequate durations of closure and anteroposterior consonant-vowel segments in mispronunciations of Japanese singleton and geminate stops.