Comparative Acoustic Analyses of L2 English: The Search for Systematic Variation
| Autor: | Rebecca Laturnus |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Linguistics and Language Acoustics and Ultrasonics media_common.quotation_subject Pronunciation Speech Acoustics 050105 experimental psychology Language and Linguistics 030507 speech-language pathology & audiology 03 medical and health sciences Perception Vowel Stress (linguistics) Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Language media_common Speech Intelligibility 05 social sciences Voice-onset time Linguistics Comprehension Formant Variation (linguistics) Speech Perception 0305 other medical science Psychology |
| Zdroj: | Phonetica. 77:441-479 |
| ISSN: | 1423-0321 0031-8388 |
| DOI: | 10.1159/000508387 |
| Popis: | Background/Aims: Previous research has shown that exposure to multiple foreign accents facilitates adaptation to an untrained novel accent. One explanation is that L2 speech varies systematically such that there are commonalities in the productions of nonnative speakers, regardless of their language background. Methods: A systematic acoustic comparison was conducted between 3 native English speakers and 6 nonnative accents. Voice onset time, unstressed vowel duration, and formant values of stressed and unstressed vowels were analyzed, comparing each nonnative accent to the native English talkers. A subsequent perception experiment tests what effect training on regionally accented voices has on the participant’s comprehension of nonnative accented speech to investigate the importance of within-speaker variation on attunement and generalization. Results: Data for each measure show substantial variability across speakers, reflecting phonetic transfer from individual L1s, as well as substantial inconsistency and variability in pronunciation, rather than commonalities in their productions. Training on native English varieties did not improve participants’ accuracy in understanding nonnative speech. Conclusion: These findings are more consistent with a hypothesis of accent attunement wherein listeners track general patterns of nonnative speech rather than relying on overlapping acoustic signals between speakers. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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