VALIDATING ACOUSTIC MEASURES OF SPEECH RHYTHM FOR SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (original) (raw)
English speech rhythm in instructed learners. Its development as shown by Varco V, 2019
Speech rhythm is viewed as the product of different phonetic and phonological properties. This work shows the rhythmic acquisition of instructed learners of English as an L2 whose mother tongue is Spanish. Two main variables are considered: levels of language proficiency at university and type of elicitation task. Taking into account that rhythm can be measured acoustically, the production of speech is computed by means of the metric VarcoV, which considers the duration of vocalic intervals. The metric measurements reflect the development of L2 spea-like rhythm affected by the type of task.
L2 Speech Rhythm and Language Experience in New Immigrants
Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), 2019
This study is a longitudinal investigation of second language (L2) speech rhythm in Cantonese-first-language (L1) immigrants. Seven Hong Kong students were recorded five times throughout a two-year period while they were living abroad in English-speaking countries. The speech rhythm of the read utterances in these recordings was then measured using several durational variability metrics. In addition, the participants were surveyed on their use of L1 and L2 speech during their time abroad. The results suggest that significant increases in durational variability and speech rate occurred during the first year abroad. Additionally, there seems to be inverse correlation between the use of L1 Cantonese and rhythmic changes in the expected direction. These findings were further supported by ratings of accentedness, comprehensibility and intelligibility of their speech production by a group of native English speakers.
Towards Understanding the Protracted Acquisition of English Rhythm
Proceedings of the ... International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2011
Several global and specific rhythm metrics and speech rate were used to characterize differences in the rhythms of 5- and 8-year-olds' spoken English. The results were that only speech rate and the rate-normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) differentiated between 5- and 8-year-olds' speech. A further result was that the variance in nPVI values was better explained by a specific measure devised to capture patterns of supralexical accenting than by the factor of age expressed in months. These results are taken to suggest that the protracted acquisition of English rhythm may be due in part to the slow rate at which children acquire prosodically conditioned vowel reduction.
Assessing foreign language speech rhythm in multilingual learners
Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity, 2015
The present study investigates the rhythmic properties of the non-native speech produced by multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language who acquire French and English as foreign languages in the German school context. Data collected from monolingual German and monolingual Chinese learners serve as control materials. For the production of the syllable-timed speech rhythm of French, it is shown that monolingual learners with (syllabletimed) Mandarin Chinese as L1 perform more target-like than learners with (stress-timed) German as L1, while the latter produce the stress-timed rhythm of the foreign language English in a more target-like way. The multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language obtain intermediate values for both French and English, as a function of their personal attitudes towards the languages of the sample and depending on the degree of multilingual and phonological awareness. We conclude that, in addition to linguistic factors such as the syllable-or stress-timedness of the languages involved, cross-linguistic influence in prosody is also constrained by certain extra-linguistic factors. Depending on the interplay of these factors, the multilingual learners can have an advantage over the German monolinguals in learning French and over the * The data analyzed for the present study were collected within the scope of the project "The influence of the background language Mandarin Chinese on the learning of further languages: Linguistic and educational perspectives", funded by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg as part of the cluster of excellence (federal level) "Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Areas" (LiMA). We are grateful for this financial support. Above all, we are deeply indebted to Adelheid Hu (University of Luxembourg), who co-directed the project at an earlier stage, for fruitful discussions on methodological issues. Further thanks go to Lan Diao (University of Hamburg), especially for her substantial help with the data collection in Beijing (May 2012). Last but not least, we would like to thank our student assistants Annette Armbrust, Rebekka Constantin, Birte Dorau, Pauline Gaillot, Jonas Grünke, Hongguang Liu, and Duygu Murathanoğlu (all University of Hamburg) for their help with transcribing and segmenting the materials.
Rhythmic variability between speakers: Articulatory, prosodic, and linguistic factors
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
Between-speaker variability of acoustically measurable speech rhythm [%V, ΔV(ln), ΔC(ln), and Δpeak(ln)] was investigated when within-speaker variability of (a) articulation rate and (b) linguistic structural characteristics was introduced. To study (a), 12 speakers of Standard German read seven lexically identical sentences under five different intended tempo conditions (very slow, slow, normal, fast, very fast). To study (b), 16 speakers of Zurich Swiss German produced 16 spontaneous utterances each (256 in total) for which transcripts were made and then read by all speakers (4096 sentences; 16 speaker × 256 sentences). Between-speaker variability was tested using analysis of variance with repeated measures on within-speaker factors. Results revealed strong and consistent between-speaker variability while within-speaker variability as a function of articulation rate and linguistic characteristics was typically not significant. It was concluded that between-speaker variability of a...
This study investigates the speech rhythm of Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese-accented English and Mandarinaccented English using acoustic rhythmic measures. They were compared with four languages in the BonnTempo corpus: German and English (stress-timed) and French and Italian (syllable-timed). Six Cantonese and six Beijing Mandarin native speakers were recorded reading the North Wind and the Sun story with a normal speech rate, telling the story semi-spontaneously and reading the English version of the story. Both raw and normalised rhythmic measures were calculated using vocalic, consonantal and syllabic durations (∆C, ∆V, ∆S, %V, VarcoC, VarcoV, VarcoS, rPVI_C, rPVI_S, nPVI_V, nPVI_S). Results confirm the syllabletiming impression of Cantonese and Mandarin. Data of the two foreign English accents poses a challenge to the rhythmic measures because the two accents are syllable-timed impressionistically but were classified as stress-timed by some of the rhythmic measures (∆C, rPVI_C, nPVI_V, ∆S, VarcoS, rPVI_S and nPVI_S). VarcoC and %V give the best classification of speech rhythm in this study.
Speech Rhythm Production In A Multilingual Setting
مجلة الأكاديمية للدراسات الاجتماعية والإنسانية
Algerian learners majoring in English as a foreign language have already been exposed to a second standard language, French, early in their learning curriculum, in addition to their mother tongue, dialectal Arabic. This multilingual profile of Algeria has been proved to affect different aspects of English acquisition mainly in the area of phonetics and phonology. However, studies dealing with the influence of the previously linguistic systems on the production of L3 speech rhythm are very scant. Therefore, the present study is conducted to classify the interlanguage rhythm and to find out whether it is conceived as a stress-timed vs. syllable-timed dichotomy or as a continuum. Audio recordings of 63 third year Algerian EFL students at Mentouri Brothers University, Constantine were segmented into vowels and consonants' sequences, and their derived rhythm metrics (%V and ∆C) were calculated using PRAAT, speech analysis software. The results of the two measured rhythm metrics yield that the informants' speech rhythm is rather 'intermediate' , merging a stress-timed ∆C and a syllable-timed %V. Accordingly, this study reveals that crosslinguistic interference in the area of phonology touches not only segments but also speech rhythm.