A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters

The instrumental study of L2 speech production: some methodological considerations

This article discusses the design and interpretation of instrumental phonetic studies of L2 speech production. The notion phonetic norm plays a crucial role in many recent studies that examine acoustic dimensions such as the frequencies of Ft-F3' vowel duration, or voice-onset time (VOT). The speech of L2 learners is evaluated to determine to what extent it diverges from the differing phonetic norms of L 1 and L2, which are estimated from the speech of a small number of native speakers. It is advisable to use monolinguals to establish the L I norms because L2 learning has been shown to affect Ll production. In initial stages of learning, L2 learners often produce words in L2 with Ll sounds: they do not modify phonetic dimensions when producing corresponding sounds in Ll and L2 phonetic norm. L2 learners with relatively greater experience in L2, on the other hand, generally approximate the phonetic norm of L2: the values of the phonetic dimensions being measured generally fall between the mean values representing the phonetic norms of L 1 and L2. Research in the area of interlanguage phonology has focused increasingly on how foreign or second language (henceforth L2) are actually pronounced (parole), rather than on theoretical considerations pertaining to the L2 learner's evolving linguistic competence (language). We have learned that differences between native 'and nonnative speakers arise either because of difficulties at a "categorical" or "subcategorical" leve1.1 A "categorical" difficulty exists when L2 learners fail to recognize that two phones in the L2 are realizations of different categories. This may happen because only one of the two L2 phones occurs with regularity on the phonetic surface of the native language (LI), or because both L2 phones closely resemble phones in L 1 which are realizations of a single LI category. Examples of this phenomenon are abundant, such as the confusion of English Irl and III by native speakers of Japanese, or the Spanish speaker's confusion of English Iii and I d

Speech perception

In this chapter, studies examining speech perception by bilingual listeners are reviewed, including studies that have examined bilinguals’ perception of L1 and/or L2 speech segments, as well as those that have tested perception of unfamiliar, non‐native speech segments. The factors that have been shown to affect bilinguals’ perception are discussed, most notably age of acquisition and L1:L2 usage both at long (e.g., proficiency and language dominance) and short timescales (e.g., language mode). An overview of the models of cross‐language speech perception that have commonly been used to explain the perceptual patterns of bilinguals are provided, even though the models themselves were not developed for this purpose. The literature on bilinguals’ perception of suprasegmentals are also reviewed. Finally, an outline is given of some challenges facing the field of bilingual speech perception to be addressed by future research