L2 dialect acquisition of German vowels: The case of Northern German and Austrian dialects
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Laura Catharine Smith
und
Wendy Baker
Abstract
This study examines how the dialect of a second language (L2) affects how accurately the L2 is perceived and produced. Specifically, we examined differences between the production and perception of German vowels /i:/, /y:/, and /u:/ by learners of either Austrian German (AG) or Northern German (NG). Vowels across these dialects differ due to how salient the /i:/–/y:/–/u:/ contrast is marked: there is (more) derounding of /y:/ in AG than in NG. This derounding in AG leads to the loss of an acoustic cue marking /i:/–/y:/, but a potentially enhanced acoustic cue for the /y:/–/u:/ contrast. As a result of these differences, both dialects have opposing cues by which to contrast /i:/, /u:/ and /y:/. Results indicate that AG learners are at times more accurate than NG learners in their perception and production of these German vowels. These results may have occurred because AG learners had a greater exposure to many dialects, and a greater desire to speak (high) German accurately than did the NG learners.
© School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2011
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- Special issue on the acquisition of second language speech: Editors’ preface
- L2 speech learning in adulthood and phonological short-term memory
- Influential factors on the production of English /θ/ by Japanese learners of English
- Learner corpora and prosody: From the COREIL corpus to principles on data collection and corpus design
- Phonological aspects of the Longman communication 3000
- An OT account of the precedence relationship between perception and production in the acquisition of English stress
- I know [pɪlɪpɪno] but i say [fɪlɪpɪno]: An investigation into Filipino foregin domestic helpers’ influence on Hong Kong Chinese’s L2 English phonology acquisition
- Assessing FL pronunciation in a semi-immersion setting: The effects of CLIL instruction on Spanish-Catalan learners’ perceived comprehensibility and accentedness
- Interaction of intrinsic vowel and consonant durational correlates with foreigner directed speech
- L2 dialect acquisition of German vowels: The case of Northern German and Austrian dialects
- Categorizing Mandarin tones into listeners’ native prosodic categories: The role of phonetic properties
- Variability and systematicity in individual learners’ Japanese lexical accent
