Volume 47, Issue 1

The aim of the present study is to extend research on individual differences in cognitive ability and second language acquisition by exploring the relationship between PSTM and L2 speech learning in advanced EFL learners. The participants (N=60) were a subset of a larger group of Catalan-Spanish bilingual EFL learners participating in 10 60-minute high-variability phonetic training sessions on the perception of the 11 British English monophthongs. Perceptual accuracy was assessed at pre- and post-test through categorization and discrimination tasks based on 5 monophthongal vowels (/i: ɪ æ ʌ ɑ:/). PSTM capacity measures were obtained at post-test using a SNWR task consisting of CVC Catalan nonwords on the basis of which participants were assigned to either low or high PSTM capacity groups The high PSTM group was found to obtain higher accuracy scores and greater perceptual accuracy gains than the low PSTM group. These results suggest that PSTM may play a role in L2 speech learning and may be involved in learners’ ability to successfully form phonetic categories for L2 sounds.

This study investigates the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors which trigger high frequency of /s/-substitution (i.e. the substitution of /s/ for /θ/) by Japanese-speaking learners of English. From the production experiment participated by 8 Japanese learners, it was found that /s/-substitution was more likely to occur in a stressed syllable before high vowels in a longer word, with /s/ in proximity, and in more spontaneous speech. The results of this study could be applied to pedagogical strategies to help Japanese learners overcome their pronunciation difficulties more efficiently.

Studies in L2 intonation and phrasal phonology are interesting not only to understand how second languages (L2) are acquired, but also to get better insights into the phonology of the target language itself. Indeed, clear descriptions are still missing for many intonational and phrasal phenomena; and analysing the speech production of L2 learners may help in analyzing phenomena that have remained unnoticed up to now (e.g. grammatical and prosodic constraints that operate in case of self-repairs, and phonological status of some prosodic events). We propose a close look at a well-designed corpus, as an introduction to this research perspective. The aim of the present contribution is twofold: (i) to present the COREIL corpus, an electronic oral learner corpus that has been designed to study the acquisition of phrasal phonology and intonation in French and English as a foreign language; (ii) to explain the principles used to collect and annotate the data. The data collection protocol is developed to be as modular as possible: for instance, it can be used to gather data produced by children as well as by adults. The protocol is intended as an easy-to-use tool that can be modified by the research community. It allows for a comparison of acquisition processes along several dimensions (L1 vs. L2, differences among L1 learners, etc).

The paper examines the implications of the Longman Communication 3000 word list for the teaching of English pronunciation at university level. In particular, I examine to what extent selected university curricula in France teach the pronunciation of this minimum of words and what modifications might be suggested to better serve the needs of students in equipping them with the pronunciation of contemporary, current vocabulary. It will be shown that this word list offers a wide range of useful examples to illustrate phonological phenomena, but teachers of English pronunciation/phonology might need to consider, for expository purposes, examples other than those found in standard handbooks of English phonology. I will show that using Longman Communication 3000 does not compromise the teaching of English phonology in any way, nor does it restrict the vocabulary to be taught. Quite the contrary, I am simply suggesting a conscious approximation of what is phonologically interesting/important to what is to be taught first.

This paper examined the relationship between perception and production by conducting experiments on 20 Japanese learners’ acquisition of English word stress. Specifically, the paper investigated whether Japanese EFL learners’ acquisition of English word stress was affected by factors such as syntactic category (noun vs. adjective) and suffix type (level 1 vs. level 2 suffixes), as well as word type (real vs. nonce word). Overall, Japanese learners’ perception accuracy was higher than their production accuracy, confirming the precedence of perception over production across the factors examined, similar to the results of Korean EFL learners in Lee (2006, 2007). However, rather different learner variation patterns emerged between Japanese and Korean EFL learners. The precedence relationship as well as different learner variation patterns was accounted for by the perception-production model proposed by Pater (2004) within Optimality Theory. Implications of the proposed analysis for language acquisition and lexical representations were further discussed.

As a response to a preliminary study (Leung 2010) of five HK learners of English which found that those who had grown up hearing Filipino-accented English showed no trace of this accent in their production, this study probes further to look for more subtle signs of exposure to Filipino English. Data were collected from 10 speakers aged 2½ to 25 who were divided into three groups. Both Groups A and B were initially exposed to Filipino-accented English input at home, and Group A continued to receive such input. Group C had not received any Filipino-accented English input at home. Findings from two perception tasks targeting English words with /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, and /v/ onsets spoken in a Filipino accent showed that speakers with exposure to Filipino-accented English could better perceive these words than those who had none. A decline from Group A to C was found in their ability to recognise target phonemes, indicating that quantity and/or recency of input play a role. These results raise the issue of incipient/passive-bi¬lin¬gual¬ism (Diebold 1964; Romaine 1995) and call for more detailed study of attitude, accommodation and identity with respect to the acquisition of a given second language variety.

This paper reports research in progress on the effect of content-based learning on speech production by Catalan-Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (FL). The data presented here are part of a longitudinal study which explores the short- and mid-term effects of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a semi-immersion programme that consists in teaching one or two subjects of the school curriculum entirely in a FL. More specifically, we intended to find out whether there was evidence of gains in intelligibility and foreign accent after one year of CLIL instruction. Two groups of learners varying in amount and nature of formal FL instruction and a control group of native English peers were recorded performing a controlled speaking task at two data collection times separated by one-year interval. The speech samples were assessed by four expert native English judges in terms of degree of comprehensibility and foreign accent. As expected, the read speech samples by the CLIL learners were judged to be more intelligible and less accented than the samples by their peers in conventional formal instruction (FI), but both groups differed significantly from the native English group. No significant short-term improvement in either intelligibility or foreign accent was found after one year of CLIL instruction, suggesting that gains in learners’ pronun-ciation in a content-based learning context are more likely to appear in the mid or long run.

Foreigner-directed and Lombard speech are two examples of speech modes that have increased intelligibility compared to normal speech. Investigating the interactions between altered speech modes and phonological contrasts may throw light on the question of which details are vital in intelligibility enhancement. The present study compares the production of vowel shortening in English, a duration-based voicing correlate, realized in a listener-directed speech style (foreigner-directed speech) with native adult-directed speech and another listener-directed speech mode (Lombard speech). British speakers completed a communicative task in cooperation with an adult native speaker or adult foreigner, in quiet and in noisy conditions. Speaker productions were analyzed to examine the changes in the duration of the target vowels and following plosive consonants. The results show that vowel shortening was present in the three speech styles. The durational voicing correlate was maintained in foreigner-directed and reduced in Lombard speech when compared with native adult-directed speech. Consonant durational differences were enhanced in foreigner-directed but reduced in Lombard speech relative to native adult-directed speech. The results suggest that foreigner-directed speech may be more intelligible in quiet conditions than Lombard speech, but less when both are presented with the same amount of noise.

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.

This study examined whether native speakers of non-tone languages (Australian English, and French) were able to perceive foreign Mandarin tones in a sentence environment according to their native prosodic categories. Results found that both English and French speakers were able to perceptually categorize foreign tones into their intonational categories (i-Categories), and that categorizations were based on the contextual phonetic similarities of the pitch contours they perceived between Mandarin tones and their native i-Categories. Results also showed that French speakers, but not English speakers, were able to detect the fine-detailed phonetic feature differences between Tone 3 and Tone 4 (low/falling tone vs. high-falling tone). The findings support a new extension of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best 1995) to suprasegmental phonology (So and Best 2008): that non-native prosodic categories (e.g. lexical tones) will be assimilated to the categories of listeners’ native prosodic system (e.g. intonation). In addition, rhythmic differences among languages may also contribute to perception of non-native tones.

This paper presents novel experimental production data to establish generalisations about the accent patterns produced by individual English learners of Japanese. 21 British English learners read aloud tokens varying in word type (two- and three-mora nouns and verbs) and speech environment (in isolation and preceding a function word) and native speakers identified the accent types produced. The results show both considerable between-learner variability and within-learner systematicity. The accent types produced are seen to vary with word type and speech environment, but both how they vary and which accent types are produced are shown to be individual to the learner. It is suggested that this combination of between-learner variability and within-learner systematicity may be the result of a difficulty in phonologically encoding Japanese lexical accent.