La pronunciación de los grupos consonánticos /tr-/ y /fr-/ por parte de los estudiantes japoneses de ELE y su evaluación por parte de los hablantes de español L1

Spanish phonotactics admits consonant clusters such as /tr-/ and /fr-/ at the beginning of a syllable and, for articulatory necessity, a vowel element, which we call epenthetic vowel, is inserted between the two consonants constituting the cluster. On the other hand, these consonant clusters are inadmissible in Japanese, and L1 Japanese speakers learning Spanish tend to insert a full vowel between the consonants, following Japanese phonotactics. The objectives of this study are (1) to compare the characteristics of vowel elements inserted by native speakers of Spanish and those inserted by Japanese learners of Spanish; and (2) to observe whether the quality of the inserted vowel of Japanese learners hinders oral communication. Observation of the pronunciation of 20 Japanese learners and two native speakers of peninsular Spanish has clarified that Japanese tend to insert a longer vowel with a clearer timbre than native speakers. The perception experiment with 50 native Spanish speakers, in which they were asked to evaluate various pronunciations, has shown that the shorter and more neutral the inserted vowel, the better the pronunciation is rated. The results suggest the need to instruct Japanese learners to pronounce Spanish “syllable by syllable,” and we believe that, for this purpose, the use of songs may be useful.