Hearing Japanese Words in English Songs : Mondegreen Phenomena by Nonnative Listeners

Abstract

This study investigates the mondegreen phenomenon - Japanese speakers, who are not proficient in English, mishear certain English lyrics as Japanese rather than just as nonsense - which occurs when Japanese speakers listen to English songs. The dataset was adopted from a website and a magazine that contained the songs of the well-known band, Queen. This dataset was presented to participants to test if they could aurally detect any Japanese words from the data. The results are comparable to those of a previous study of native speakers of English, showing that phonetically similar segments cause perceptual reinterpretations. The results also suggest a particular feature of nonnative listeners. They tend to interpret what they hear at face value because they cannot compensate for phonological reduction(s): speaking/listening strategies of native speakers such as coarticulation and deletion. From an experiment, we also obtained the results that Japanese listeners tend to isolate Japanese words from English songs where the same vowels are shared in both languages and where the structure of a syllable and a mora are matched. In EFL contexts, listening learning usually focuses on differences between sound features, but the results of this study suggest that common phonetic features also deserve attention.