Can speech rate transfer between languages? Evidence from Japanese and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Whether speech rate can transfer between languages with distinctive speech rates is an understudied issue. Impressionistically, Japanese is faster than Mandarin Chinese. We investigated the speech rate of native Japanese and Mandarin speakers, advanced L2 learners and simultaneous bilinguals respectively. Nine native Beijing Mandarin speakers, five native Japanese speakers, thirteen advanced L1 Japanese learners of Mandarin and eleven Japanese-Mandarin simultaneous bilinguals participated in a passage reading task and a spontaneous speech task. The comparison between Japanese and Mandarin by native Mandarin speakers and native Japanese speakers confirmed that the speech rate of native Japanese was faster than that of Mandarin. Comparison between the speech rate of Japanese and Mandarin by advanced Japanese learners and simultaneous bilinguals showed that both groups produced Japanese constantly faster than their Mandarin. Both advanced Japanese learners and simultaneous bilinguals produced Japanese similarly as native Japanese speakers did. However, the Mandarin speech rate by advanced Japanese learners was significantly slower than that of native Mandarin speakers, while the Mandarin speech rate between simultaneous bilinguals and native Mandarin speakers remained non-significant. The findings challenge previous proposals that speech rate transfer could happen at a language level. Moreover, simultaneous bilinguals showed an advantage over advanced L2 learners in speech rate mastery.