The current project longitudinally investigated the extent to which first-year Japanese university students developed their second language (L2) oral ability in relation to increased input in foreign language classrooms. Their spontaneous speech was elicited at the beginning, middle and end of one academic year, and then judged by linguistically…

The canonical form for Japanese words is (Consonant)Vowel(Consonant) Vowel[approximately]. However, a regular process of high vowel devoicing between voiceless consonants and word-finally after voiceless consonants results in consonant clusters and word-final consonants, apparent violations of that phonotactic pattern. We investigated Japanese…