Methodological Perspective on Second Language Prosody (original) (raw)
Related papers
Stress, Rhythm and Intonation for Teachers and Students
These are notes on English stress, rhythm and intonation. Part A is for students and Part B is for teachers. The treatment here is “technical”, as by a linguist, but in very plain language. Even with poor formal English, L2 speakers who “sound right” will gain social acceptance, and this in turn will greatly accelerate their learning. Firstly the concept of “the music of a language” is introduced. It is noted that languages are on a scale of “syllable timed” to “stress timed” (though this is not a simple matter). English is a stress-timed language. Both word stress and sentence stress are essential in English. However, proper word liaison and elision marks native speakers from non-native speakers. Some advice is given on how to practice privately and in a classroom. The importance of teacher talk as a model is noted.
The misuse of speech rhythm components by undergraduate students
2017
The nature of speech rhythm classes has been a matter of much debate as to whether it should be conceived as a discrete stress-timed vs. syllable-timed dichotomy or as a continuum. According to the new account of speech rhythm, the fact that Algerian Arabic and English belong to the same rhythmic class does not necessarily mean that Algerian learners of English as a foreign language will produce the correct rhythmic patterns of English. The production of the latter is rather related to their interlanguage which is affected by the previously known linguistic systems' phonology. The present research sets out to classify the rhythm of the interlanguage produced by third year Algerian EFL students at Mentouri University as well as to investigate the role of interference in the shaping of this interlanguage speech rhythm. Accordingly, we hypothesised that the features of speech rhythm components produced by the informants would be affected by interference from the previously known linguistic systems i.e. Algerian Arabic, Standard Arabic and French. We also hypothesised that the resulting interlanguage speech rhythm would be a hybrid of stress-timed and syllable-timed speech rhythms. An error analysis of the informants' production of vowel reduction, syllable structure and stress is conducted in order to verify the first hypothesis. As for the second hypothesis, a corpus of the informants' recordings is acoustically analysed by means of the universal speech analysis software, Praat, in order to eventually measure the rhythm metrics %V and ∆C. The findings obtained confirm both hypotheses. The informants' rhythmic patterns are mostly affected by their first foreign language, French, and to a great extent by spelling pronunciation. The metrics measured in this study i.e. %V and ∆C, yield that the informants' speech rhythm is rather intermediate, merging a stress-timed ∆C and a syllabletimed %V. Following the findings obtained, a syllabus for teaching the different aspects of speech rhythm at the word and sentence level in both modules, 'Phonetics' and 'Oral Expression and Listening Comprehension', is suggested.
Rhythm in English: Implications for Teaching
Journal of the Tohoku English Language Education Society 34, 2014
In this paper, we examine the rhythm of English as spoken by Japanese native speakers. It is commonly said that the rhythm types of world languages can be divided into two groups. On the one hand, languages like English, German and Dutch have stress-timed rhythm, allowing a greater range of syllable structures, with complex codas and onsets, and with heavier syllables that are likely to attract stress, and also tend to reduce unstressed vowels when compared with vowels in stressed syllables: a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable structure (closed syllable structure: mainly Germanic languages). On the other hand, languages such as Japanese, Spanish and Italian are syllable-timed, which have a consonant-vowel syllable structure (open syllable structure: mainly found in Romance languages, as well as Japanese) without reduction of unstressed vowels. As a result of transfer, many Japanese students speak English with a syllable-timed rhythm instead of a stress-timed rhythm. This paper reports on the results of a study conducted to compare the intelligibility of Japanese English using a syllable-timed rhythm and that using a stressed-timed rhythm. Results show that a stress-timed rhythm is significantly more intelligible than a syllable-timed rhythm for native English speakers. We advise Japanese learners of English to be aware of the importance of speaking English with stress-timed rhythm.
The acquisition of English rhythm as a function of changes in phrase-level prosody
Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2011
This study investigated the integration of word-and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by 25 school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and 25 adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and amplitude measures of syllable rhymes were used to assess the realization of lexical stress, and fundamental frequency (F0) measures were used to assess the realization of phrasal pitch accents across conditions. Results showed that the duration and F0 correlates varied independently of each other as a function of condition in child speech, but much less so in adult speech. The group differences were taken to indicate that 6-year-old children have yet to develop prosodic structures with integrated prominence. Structural and pragmatic interpretations of the results are discussed.
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.
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.
The improvement of Spanish/Catalan EFL students' prosody by means of explicit rhythm instruction
ISAPh 2018 International Symposium on Applied Phonetics
Language rhythm is a suprasegmental feature whose teaching within the EFL classroom can help students improve their L2 global prosody. This paper documents a longitudinal study conducted with ESP students at Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain). Two groups were established: the experimental group, which received explicit rhythm instruction, and the control group, which did not. Both groups participated in ten weekly pronunciation sessions following Celce-Murcia's communicative framework and adapted to the technical context of the course. This study investigates the extent to which rhythm training positively influences students' prosody by analyzing ten sentences uttered before and after the instruction and measuring their VarcoV values. Results show that the experimental group tends to increase their VarcoV values after training, adopting a more English-like rhythm, while the control group behaves incongruently. Despite ANOVAs and t-tests not always being significant, the effect sizes of the differences between pre-and post-instruction reach significance.
International Journal of English Studies, 2001
In this article we present part of the results of an empirical research on contrastive rhythm (English-Spanish). Of the several points dealt with in such a research (syllable compression, foot timing, syllable timing and isochrony of rhythmic units), we refer here to syllable duration in English and Spanish as well as the leaming of syllable duration by a group of advanced leamers of English whose first language is Spanish. Regarding the issue of syllable timing, a striking result is the equal duration of unstressed syllables in both languages, which challenges an opposite view underlying a teaching practice common among Spanish teachers of English to Spanish learners of that language. As for the interlanguage of the group of Spanish leamers of English, we comment on the presence of an interference error represented by a stressed/unstressed durational ratio mid way between the ratios for Spanish and English; we have also detected a developmental error related to the tempo employed by the leamers in their syllable timing, which is slower than the tempo produced by native speakers of English.
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.