Unstressed Vowels in German Learner English: An Instrumental Study

This study investigates the production of vowels in unstressed syllables by advanced German learners of English in comparison with native speakers of Standard Southern British English. Two acoustic properties were measured: duration and formant structure. The results indicate that duration of unstressed vowels is similar in the two groups, though there is some variation depending on the phonetic context. In terms of formant structure, learners produce slightly higher F1 and considerably lower F2, the difference in F2 being statistically significant for each learner. Formant values varied as a function of context and orthographic representation of the vowel

Foreign Accents in Polish: Non-native Speakers’ and Native Listeners’ Views

to draw implications for the phonetic training of foreigners who undertake to learn Polish

Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repetition-priming effects (like the L1 group), but no priming for inflected and reduced priming for derived word forms. We argue that this striking contrast between L1 and L2 processing supports the view that adult L2 learners rely more on lexical storage and less on combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than native speakers.</jats:p

Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma &amp; Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies

English Stress Placement by Japanese Students : Effects of Syllable Structure and Noun-Verb Stress Differences

Stress or accent plays an important role in the production of spoken language. Identifying the factors which affect stress placement is crucial to better understanding of how people process native and nonnative language. This study examined how Japanese learners of English deal with English word stress. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of the general noun-verb stress difference in English on stress judgment of English words by Japanese students. Experiment 2 tested the effect of syllable structure on the placement of primary stress in novel words. The results indicate that Japanese students of English have different knowledge of stress patterns between nouns and verbs and that their stress placement was influenced by vowel length, number of consonants, and the phonotactic legality of intervocalic consonants in words

The Effects of Talker Variability and Frequency of Exposure on the Acquisition of Spoken Word Knowledge

Eighty Japanese learners of English as a foreign language encountered 40 target words in one of four experimental conditions (three encounters, six encounters, three encounters with talker variability, and six encounters with talker variability). A picture-naming test was conducted three times (pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest) and elicited speech samples were scored in terms of form-meaning connection (spoken form recall) and word stress accuracy (stress placement accuracy and vowel duration ratio). Results suggested that frequency of exposure consistently promoted the recall of spoken forms, whereas talker variability was more closely related to the enhancement of word stress accuracy. These findings shed light on how input quantity (frequency) and quality (variability) affect different stages of lexical development and provide implications for vocabulary teaching

Stress production by Cebuano learners of Arabic: A metrical analysis

Stress is one of the most neglected components of the Arabic language in classrooms (Lin, 2018; Ryding, 2013).This study is devoted to analyzing stress production in Arabic as produced by Cebuano learners in order to highlight the challenges so that teachers can address them in the best way. The data have been examined within the metrical theory of word stress elaborated in Hayes (1995). A sample of 100 words has been considered, spoken by six non-native speakers of Arabic, three females and three males, whose first language is Cebuano, the national language of the Philippines. Data analysis shows that native Cebuano speakers have an iambic foot, where the foot involves left-to-right parsing, satisfies the End Rule Right Principle by which the main stress lands on the head of the rightmost visible foot, and imposes a weak ban on the degenerate foot. Intriguingly, foot iambicity observed in the produced words is regarded as a reflection of the speakers’ source language (L1) that has an iambic foot. Arabic words spoken by Cebuano non-natives conform to the bimoraic condition for the minimal phonological word that takes the primary stress, and is repaired only through vowel lengthening; whereas gemination, as a main strategy for creating bimoraicity, is totally absent. Similarly, vowel lengthening is seen as a transfer effect of L1, where stress always attracts a long vowel. The results point to the great importance of prosody in teaching Arabic as a foreign language, since prosodic features significantly contribute to the communication intelligibility

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch

The perception of Spanish lexical stress in yes/no questions and exclamations by Japanese-speaking late learners: evidence for the effect of context of learning

Whereas the acquisition of Spanish lexical stress by English-speaking learners has received some attention (Face, 2003; Lord, 2001; 2004; Marasco, Steele, Sunara, & Colantoni, 2012), very little is known about the perception of Spanish lexical stress by Japanese-speaking learners (Atria, Kimura, Sensui, Takasawa & Toyomaru, 2012). Specifically, little is known about the perception of Spanish lexical stress in interrogative and exclamative sentences by Japanese-speaking learners. The language pairing is novel and lends itself well to the study of perception of stress because whereas Spanish is a stress-accent language, Japanese is a pitch-accent language, where stress is acoustically realized differently in each language. This study has three goals. First, it seeks to make an empirical and a theoretical contribution to the field of second language phonology by examining the perception of Spanish lexical stress by advanced Japanese-speaking learners of Spanish. In particular, it aims to examine and compare the perception of paroxytone (limite; he limits) and proparotytone (límite; limit) words in sentence-final and non-final position of both yes/no questions and exclamations. Subsequently, it will determine, how the L1 (first language) Japanese prosodic system may interact with the variation in the realization of F0 peak displacement in the latter contexts in Spanish. The study also examines the effect of context of learning as well as type of words. The participants consisted of 45 advanced Japanese-speaking late learners of Spanish (20 in Bogotá and 25 in Japan). Their ages varied between 22 and 50 years old. The control group consisted of 20 native Spanish speakers of Bogotá Spanish. The three groups were required to participate in a stress identification task. Nine sets of 3 syllable accentual minimal triplets with each having an oxytone (e.g., nabidó), a paroxytone (e.g., nabido) and a proparoxytone (e.g., nábido) were used. The participants listened to the target words in five different contexts: isolation (e.g., medico), final position of yes/no questions (e.g., ¿él dijo límite?), final position in exclamations (e.g., ¡él dijo válido!), non-final position of yes/no questions (e.g., ¿él dijo medicó ayer?), and non-final position of exclamations (e.g., ¡él dijo medico ayer!). Results show that learners have difficulty perceiving the Spanish lexical stress, indicating that the interaction of the Japanese and Spanish prosodic systems lead to the misperception of lexical stress. The recorded stimuli produced by a native speaker of Bogota Spanish are analyzed acoustically and the variation in F0 peak displacement in different prosodic contexts is discussed as a potential factor for miscuing the learners. Moreover, results show an advantage for the Bogota L2 (second language) group, who had been immersed in Colombia in comparison with the Japan L2 group, who had received classroom instruction in Japan. Furthermore, there was no effect of type of word (i.e., real vs, nonce word). The study has implications for models of L2 speech learning as well as pedagogical implications