Lecture | LIAS After-Lunch Talk Series
‘Tikitoki’ or ‘Tikutoku’? Speech variation among bilinguals in Japan’s Brazilian Diaspora
- Date
- Wednesday 23 April 2025
- Time
- Series
- LIAS After-Lunch Talk Series
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.30 (KITLV Seminar Room)
Abstract
Japan is home to a Brazilian diaspora of approximately 200,000 individuals who are bilingual in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Japanese. Although BP and Japanese are unrelated languages, they share similar constraints that determine which combinations of speech sounds are allowed in spoken words. These constraints, also known as phonotactics, prohibit most consonant clusters and word-final consonants. For example, a loanword like TikTok (which has an illicit /kt/ consonant cluster and a word-final -/k/), is typically pronounced as /ti.ki.tɔ.ki/ in BP and as /tik.ku.tok.ku/ in Japanese. As these examples show, speakers ‘repair’ illicit consonant structures by inserting a vowel: typically /i/ in BP and /u/ in Japanese. While monolingual speakers of BP and Japanese consistently apply these repair strategies, less is known about bilingual speakers. Do they separately apply the BP strategy (‘insert an /i/’) when speaking BP, and the Japanese strategy (‘insert an /u/) when speaking Japanese, or does one language’s strategy spill over into the other? If so, what predicts such spillover? To answer these questions, I present data from a production experiment that examines individual variation in phonological repair strategies by BP-Japanese bilingual speakers.
About the speaker
I have been assistant professor in Japanese linguistics at LIAS and LUCL since January 2023, where I teach linguistics courses with a focus on Asian languages, as well as practical courses in experimental phonetics. I am interested in the ways in which bilingual speakers perceive, produce, and lexically process the sounds of language, and why do they each do so in their unique, individual way. I use established procedures rooted in experimental phonetics to investigate how individual linguistic factors (such as language background), as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musicality or working memory) jointly shape such individual differences in speech processing.