Non-Native Speech Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The present study investigates on the production of English dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ by native French students, it attempts to explore the difficulties faced in the pronunciation of these sounds at different positions at the words level. Twenty-four students from the University of Franche-Comté participated in the study. We collected their recordings and questionnaire answers. The data permitted us, after analysis, to see to what extent French students mispronounce the two dental fricative sounds /θ/ and /ð/ and which sounds act as substitutes for these latter. Studies have shown multiple factors affecting pronunciation as motivation and exposure to language, self-confidence, the current study examined the relation between these variables and pronunciation of the students and found that these three factors have a significant effect on pronunciation.

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- Fricatives, English Pronunciation, Non-Native Speech

How fast can listeners adapt to unfamiliar foreign accents? Clarke & Garrett (2004; CG04) reported that native-English listeners adapted to foreign-accented English within a minute, demonstrating improved efficiency in recognizing spoken words. In two web-based experiments that closely follow the design of CG04, we revisit the effects of rapid accent adaptation and explore its generalization across talkers. Experiment 1 replicated the core finding of CG04 that initial perceptual difficulty with foreign-accented speech can be attenuated rapidly by a brief period of exposure to an accented talker. Importantly, listeners showed both faster (replicating CG04) and more accurate (novel finding) comprehension of this talker. Experiment 2 revealed new evidence that such adaptation generalized to a different talker of a same accent. These results challenge arguments for fundamental limitation of short-term accent adaptation. We suggest that the web-based paradigm provides a useful tool for investigations in speech perceptual learning.

- by T. Florian Jaeger and +1
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- Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Psycholinguistics, Speech perception

Particular durable second language (L2) pronunciation distinctions of speakers who belong to the same first language (L1) community serve as their instant audio-identification markers, creating their typical phonetic portrait. Deviations in non-native English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher pronunciation remain a vibrant area of research due to their impact on speech intelligibility and comprehensibility, their pragmatic and emotional potential in oral verbal communication. The purpose of this contribution was to establish standard pronunciation deviations in academic speech of Ukrainian EFL teachers, thus depicting their phonetic portrait. A research methodology included acoustic and auditory analyses of pronunciation of British and Ukrainian speakers of English. The findings showed that Ukrainian EFL teachers display a set of common pronunciation distinctions: on the tonal level of the beginning and the end of the intonation group, tonal range, interval, rate and tone movement change in different parts of the intonation group, volume realization, speech rate; lack of qualitative and quantitative differences in the pronunciation of long and short monophthongs in stressed and unstressed syllables, full pronunciation of unstressed vowels. The results will find their application in EFL teacher education programs and further research of the accented speech nature.

This paper describes "TLT-school", a corpus of speech utterances collected in schools of northern Italy for assessing the performance of students learning both English and German. The corpus was recorded in the years 2017 and 2018 from students aged between nine and sixteen years, attending primary, middle and high school. All utterances have been scored, in terms of some predefined proficiency indicators, by human experts. In addition, most of utterances recorded in 2017 have been manually transcribed carefully. Guidelines and procedures used for manual transcriptions of utterances will be described in detail, as well as results achieved by means of an automatic speech recognition system developed by us. Part of the corpus is going to be freely distributed to scientific community particularly interested both in non-native speech recognition and automatic assessment of second language proficiency.

- by Stefano Bannò
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- Corpus Linguistics, Language Learning, Children's speech, Non-Native Speech

This study examines how lexical frequency and planning problems can predict phonetic variability in the function word 'the' in conversational speech produced by non-native speakers of English. We examined 3180 tokens of 'the' drawn from English conversations between native speakers of Czech or Norwegian. Using regression models, we investigated the effect of following word frequency and disfluencies on three phonetic parameters: vowel duration, vowel quality, and consonant quality. Overall, the non-native speakers showed variation that is very similar to the variation displayed by native speakers of English. Like native speakers, Czech speakers showed an effect of frequency on vowel durations, which were shorter in more frequent word sequences. Both groups of speakers showed an effect of frequency on consonant quality: the substitution of another consonant for /ð/ occurred more often in the context of more frequent words. The speakers in this study also showed a native-like allophonic distinction in vowel quality, in which /ði/ occurs more often before vowels and /ðəә/ before consonants. Vowel durations were longer in the presence of following disfluencies, again mirroring patterns in native speakers, and the consonant quality was more likely to be the target /ð/ before disfluencies, as opposed to a different consonant. The fact that non-native speakers show native-like sensitivity to lexical frequency and disfluencies suggests that these effects are consequences of a general, non-language-specific production mechanism governing language planning. On the other hand, the non-native speakers in this study did not show native-like patterns of vowel quality in the presence of disfluencies, suggesting that the pattern attested in native speakers of English may result from language-specific processes separate from the general production mechanisms.