Assimilation of Voicing in Czech Speakers of English: The Effect of the Degree of Accentedness

Czech and English are languages which differ with respect to the implementation of voicing. Unlike in English, there is a considerable agreement between phonological (systemic) and phonetic (actual) voicing in Czech, and, more importantly, the two languages have different strategies for the assimilation of voicing across the word boundary. The present study investigates the voicing in word-final obstruents in Czech speakers of English with the specific aim of ascertaining whether the degree of the speakers’ foreign accent correlates with the way they treat English obstruents in assimilatory contexts. L2 speakers, divided into three groups of varying accentedness, were examined employing categorization and a voicing profile method for establishing the presence/absence of voicing. The results suggest that speakers with a different degree of Czech accent do differ in their realization of voicing in the way predicted by a negative transfer of assimilatory habits from Czech

The effect of word-initial glottalization on word monitoring in Slovak speakers of English

The study investigates the impact of glottal elements before word-initial vowels on the speed of processing of the phrases taken from natural continuous speech. In many languages a word beginning with a vowel can be preceded by a glottal stop or a short period of creaky voice. However, languages differ in the extent of use and functions of this glottalization: it may be used to mark the word boundary, for instance, or to add special prominence to the word. The aim of the experiment was to find out whether the presence of the glottal element can influence reaction times in a word-monitoring paradigm. Users of different languages - Slovak and Czech learners of English, as well as native speakers of English - were participating in perception testing so that the influence of the mother tongue could be determined. The results confirm the effect of both glottalization and the L1 of the listeners. In addition, a significant effect of test item manipulations was found. Although the phrases with added or deleted glottal stops displayed no obvious acoustic artefacts, they produced longer reaction times than items with naturally present or absent glottalizations. We believe that this finding underlines the importance of inherent stress patterns, whose alterations lead to the increase in processing load

The Impact of Rhythmic Distortions in Speech on Personality Assessment

The perennial question as to how perceived otherness in speech projects into listener assessment of one’s personality has been systematically investigated within the field of foreign accentedness, vocal communication of affective states and vocal stereotyping. In the present study, we aimed at exploring non-native listeners’ capacity to respond to differences in natural and modified native speech, particularly whether the manipulation of temporal structure in both stressed and unstressed syllables gives rise to any changes in the perception of the speaker’s personality. The respondents’ intuitive judgements were captured in the domain of the ‘nervousness category’ taken from the five-factor model of personality. Our results indicate an effect of temporal modifications on the listeners’ judgements. Analysis of variance for repeated measures confirmed a highly significant shift of personality evaluations towards the undesired traits (e.g., nervousness, anxiety, querulousness). Several interesting interactions with the semantic contents of the utterances and with the intrinsic qualities of the speakers’ voices were also found. We argue that the effects of accented speech go beyond conscious willingness to accept “otherness” and suggest a method for studying them

Credibility of native and non-native speakers of English revisited: Do non-native listeners feel the same?

This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 nonnative speakers of English. 121 non-native listeners rated the truthfulness of the statements on a 7-point scale. The results of our study tentatively do confirm a negative bias against non-native speakers as perceived by non-native listeners, showing that subconscious attitudes to language varieties are also relevant in communication among non-native speakers

Foreign language learners acquire L2 phonetic detail: Goose and Foot fronting in non-native English

Whether late learners discern fine phonetic detail in second-language (L2) input, form new phonetic categories, and realize them accurately remains a relevant question in L2 phonology, especially for foreign-language (FL) learning characterized by limited exposure to interactional native input. Our study focuses on advanced Czech learners’ production of the L2 English vowels GOOSE and FOOT. While English /u/ and /ʊ/ have been undergoing fronting, their Czech equivalents, /uː/ and /u/, are fully back. We show that although the spectral differentiation of /u/-/ʊ/ is smaller in the learners’ than in native speech, the vowels being contrasted primarily in length, even FL learners can shift their L2 sound categories towards native-like targets, or in this case, produce English /u/-/ʊ/ as fronted

Measuring a speaker's acoustic correlates of pitch - but which? A contrastive analysis for perceived speaker charisma

Intonation is a multitasker. It conveys a plethora of non-lexical meanings and functions, and mirrors a speaker’s personality traits, one of them being charisma. In the age in which leaders communicate globally through digital mass media, speaker charisma has become an important field of research. The number of different f0 level and range measures that are used, not only in phonetics, to determine speaker charisma call for standardization. Which f0 measures correlate most strongly with perceived speaker charisma and should thus be used in future analyses? Our study addresses this question based on 51 speakers whose charisma was rated by 42 listeners. Results show that the f0 mean is the best parameter to measure perceived charisma in terms of pitch level, while the best pitch distribution measures are kurtosis and the 80-percentile f0 range. The results are discussed in terms of gender differences and issues of cross-linguistic generalization

Spectral Characteristics of Schwa in Czech Accented English

The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direc

Measuring a speaker's acoustic correlates of pitch - but which? A contrastive analysis for perceived speaker charisma

Intonation is a multitasker. It conveys a plethora of non-lexical meanings and functions, and mirrors a speaker’s personality traits, one of them being charisma. In the age in which leaders communicate globally through digital mass media, speaker charisma has become an important field of research. The number of different f0 level and range measures that are used, not only in phonetics, to determine speaker charisma call for standardization. Which f0 measures correlate most strongly with perceived speaker charisma and should thus be used in future analyses? Our study addresses this question based on 51 speakers whose charisma was rated by 42 listeners. Results show that the f0 mean is the best parameter to measure perceived charisma in terms of pitch level, while the best pitch distribution measures are kurtosis and the 80-percentile f0 range. The results are discussed in terms of gender differences and issues of cross-linguistic generalization

Foreign or Native-like? The Attitudes of Czech EFL Learners Towards Accents of English and Their Use as Pronunciation Models

Attitudes of language users to English in the international context certainly do not rank among newly studied subjects. One of the frequent caveats of the ongoing research, however, is that it mostly targets university students of English, which may provide a very skewed perspective. This study focuses on young Czech speakers of English who have studied or are studying other disciplines and uses an online survey to examine their attitudes to English pronunciation in general and to their own pronunciation, to various accents of English and also to exposure to model accents. Analyses of 145 respondents show that 70% of them would like to acquire a native-like accent (most frequently General British), even though most of them use English with other foreigners (and not native speakers). They prefer to be exposed to many different accents of English, native and non-native, and believe that learners should themselves choose which accent they want to regard as a model. One of the most important findings concerns the participants’ belief that pronunciation is teachable and that it is worth working on it; this should provide encouragement to teachers of English. In general, our results suggest that the ELF approach and the associated Lingua Franca Core concept do not seem to be relevant for young Czech users of English.385

Pre-Fortis Shortening in Czech English: A Production and Reaction-Time Study

This study focuses on the production and perception of English words with a fortis vs. lenis obstruent in the syllable coda. The contrast is mostly cued by the duration of the preceding vowel, which is shorter before fortis than before lenis sounds in native speech. In the first experiment we analyzed the production of 10 Czech speakers of English and compared them to two native controls. The results showed that the Czech speakers did not sufficiently exploit duration to cue the identity of the word-final obstruent. In the second experiment we manipulated C and V durations in target words to transplant the native ratios onto the Czech-accented speech, enhancing the fortis-lenis contrast, and vice versa. 108 listeners took part in a word-monitoring task in which reaction times were measured. The hypothesized advantage to items in which the target word (with a fortis or lenis obstruent) was semantically congruent with the following context was not confirmed, and subsequent analyses showed that the words’ frequency of use and the collocations they enter into strongly affect speech processing and correlate to a large degree with the reaction times