MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY OF ENGLISH VOWELS BY CHINESE DIALECT SPEAKERS (original) (raw)

Production of English vowels by speakers of Mandarin Chinese with prolonged exposure to English

Previous studies of non-native production of English vowels have demonstrated that a native-like attainment of certain distinctions is not guaranteed for all speakers, despite prolonged exposure to the target (e.g., . The current study examines the applicability of this finding to a group of non-native speakers from the same L1 background (Mandarin Chinese) who are all long-term residents in the USA (7 years minimum) and adult arrivals (> age 18). These non-native speakers (N=36) and a control group of native speakers (N=22) were recorded reading two sets of materials: the Stella paragraph (Weinberg 2012) and five sentences from Flege et al. (1999). Vowel formant measurements were extracted for all tokens from the following three pairs of vowels: [i], [e], and [a]. Euclidean distances between the z-normalized (F1, F2) mean values for the two vowels in each pair for each speaker show that the non-native speakers produce each of the three pairs significantly less distinctly than the native speakers. This finding corroborates previous similar findings and suggests that a speaker's L1 continues to have a strong influence on vowel production, despite long-term exposure to the target.

Intelligibility and acoustic correlates of Japanese accented English vowels

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96

To produce near-native American English (AE) vowels, Japanese speakers must extend their five vowel system with at least six new vowels. Three experiments have been conducted to acquire both perceptual and acoustic measures about Japanese accented English (JE)vowels. Six non-back vowels of AE in several phonetic environments were recorded from four Japanese male talkers with moderate English skills. Intelligibility was assessed by a panel of six Americans as the percent of JE vowels identified as intended. The first experiment was an open-set identification task. Two vowels, /i/ and /e/, were fully intelligible (>98%) while others ranked from 81% (/e/) to 23% (//) intelligible. The second experiment used minimal-pair responses to assess intelligibility in terms of three acoustic properties of vowels, the spectral target, dynamic formants and duration. The results indicated that the spectral property was not communicated effectively, dynamics were partially effective, and duration was used effectively. In the third experiment a stepwise multiple linear regression analysis determined how these acoustic properties contributed to the intelligibility. For the two vowels analyzed, /w/ and /ae/, the direction and extent of the formant movement of JE vowels in relation to the AE targets was the vowel property that contributed the most to intelligibility.

Vowel perception by listeners from different English dialects

2015

Native English listeners from North America rely primarily on changes in formants, not vowel duration, when perceiving the vowel contrast in the minimal pair bit and beat manipulated from a Canadian English sample [5]. In this paper, we evaluated which cue do native English listeners from other regions use when perceiving the same North American vowel contrast. For this purpose, we used the same task and stimuli as in the study with North American listeners. Our results indicate that listeners from the UK, New Zealand, Ireland and Singapore used primarily changes in formants, a pattern similar to listeners from North America. Australian listeners, however, relied primarily on vowel duration rather than formants. The reaction time results suggest that the difference between Australian listeners and other listeners may be due to differences in the characteristics of vowels in Australian English versus North American English.

Intelligibility of English vowels produced by Nigerian and Malaysian speakers

2020

The widespread use of the English language raises concerns about maintaining the mutual intelligibility across different nonnative English varieties. Some have viewed nonnative English varieties as distorted forms of English that cannot stand on their own that would cause the language to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible varieties. This study is an attempt to ascertain if there is mutual intelligibility between Nigerian and Malaysian English speakers, as there is little exploration of the intelligibility of African English varieties to Malaysians and vice versa. Forty Nigerians and 80 Malaysian undergraduate ESL students took part in a vowel discrimination task. The Nigerians listened to the words recorded by Malaysian speakers while the Malaysians listened to the words recorded by Nigerian speakers. Seven pairs of vowels were chosen as target vowel contrasts tested. Results showed that the Nigerians and Malaysians performed well in the discrimination task with performance above the guessing threshold for most of the selected pairs of vowel contrasts. Findings suggest that mutual intelligibility exists between the 2 recognized nonnative English varieties.

Effects of experience on non-native speakers' production and perception of English vowels

Journal of Phonetics, 1997

This study assessed the effect of English-language experience on nonnative speakers' production and perception of English vowels. Twenty speakers each of German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean, as well as a control group of 10 native English (NE) speakers, participated. The non-native subjects, who were first exposed intensively to English when they arrived in the United States (mean age"25 years), were assigned to relatively experienced or inexperienced subgroups based on their length of residence in the US (M"7.3 vs. 0.7 years). The 90 subjects' accuracy in producing English /i > 2 ae/ was assessed by having native Englishspeaking listeners attempt to identify which vowels had been spoken, and through acoustic measurements. The same subjects also identified the vowels in synthetic beat-bit (/i/-/>/) and bat-bet (/ae/-/2/) continua. The experienced non-native subjects produced and perceived English vowels more accurately than did the relatively inexperienced non-native subjects. The non-native subjects' degrees of accuracy in producing and perceiving English vowels were related. Finally, both production and perception accuracy varied as a function of native language (L1) background in a way that appeared to depend on the perceived relation between English vowels and vowels in the L1 inventory.

Vowel Intelligibility in Chinese

Conventional wisdom states that, since the average amplitude of vowel articulation significantly exceeds that for consonants, an assessments of spoken intelligibility in obscuring noise should primarily be limited by consonant confusion. Furthermore, in both English and Chinese, consonant discrimination is considered to be more important to overall intelligibility than that of vowels. In the unbounded case, the assumption that vowel confusion is less important than consonant confusion may well be true, however at least two situations exist where the influence of vowel confusion may be greater. The first is where vocabulary-specific restrictions confine the structure of a particular spoken word to alternatives differing primarily in their vowel. The second is the prevalence of non AWGN interference, particularly impulsive noise which obscures only the vowel portion of a word, and similarly is present as a nonlinear effects of many time-sliced processing algorithms.

Discrimination of synthesized English vowels by American and Korean listeners

Journal of The Acoustical Society of America - J ACOUST SOC AMER, 2001

This study explored the discrimination of synthesized English vowel pairs by 27 American and Korean, male and female listeners. The average formant values of nine monophthongs produced by ten American English male speakers were employed to synthesize the vowels. Then, subjects were instructed explicitly to respond to AX discrimination tasks in which the standard vowel was followed by another one with the increment or decrement of the original formant values. The highest and lowest formant values of the same vowel quality were collected and compared to examine patterns of vowel discrimination. Results showed that the American and Korean groups discriminated the vowel pairs almost identically and their center formant frequency values of the high and low boundary fell almost exactly on those of the standards. In addition, the acceptable range of the same vowel quality was similar among the language and gender groups. The acceptable thresholds of each vowel formed an oval to maintain pe...

Effect of linguistic experience on the identification of Mandarin Chinese vowels and tones

Journal of Phonetics, 1997

The importance of consonant transitions for American English vowel identification has been demonstrated by studies of ''silent-center'' syllables (Strange , 1989 a) , in which only the initial and final portions of the syllable are presented. For such syllables , identification is quite accurate , nearly reaching the accuracy of intact syllables. The present study examined sources of acoustic information for vowels and tones in Mandarin Chinese , comparing identification of intact syllables to syllables with the initial and final portions removed (center-only) , syllables with the centers removed (silent-center) , and syllables with only the initial transition presented (initial-only). In Experiment 1 , test syllables were presented with the word / d z ! / which immediately followed the test syllable in the original sentence. Native Chinese listeners made few identification errors with intact , centeronly , and silent-center syllables. Non-native listeners made more errors overall , especially errors of tone identification , and did more poorly on silent-center syllables than on center-only syllables. Both natives and non-natives made more tone confusions in the initial-only condition , and they misidentified the diphthong / uo / as / u /. In experiment 2 , test syllables were presented without the word / d z ! /. Natives made more errors than in Experiment 1 , suggesting that carry-over tonal coarticulation in the / dz ! / provided information about the test word's tone. Types of errors made by natives were dif ferent from those of non-natives. Explanations for the dif ferent error patterns are of fered. รท 1997 Academic Press Limited 1. Introduction Although vowels are often described in terms of the frequency of the first two speech formants (F 1 and F 2) as measured in the middle of the syllable , naturally spoken vowels are rarely static in formant information. Formant shifts intrinsic to the vowel (Nearey , 1989) , the relative duration of the syllable (e. g ., Gottfried , Miller , & Payton , 1990) , and the rapidly changing syllable-initial and-final formant transitions (usually associated with the consonant) all contribute to the