Presentations Abstracts Barrett, Catrice University of Pennsylvania Music in the pronunciation classroom: Are all approaches created equal?

Intonational patterns are constrained by the architecture of our vocal tract, but such constraints can be manipulated by the speakers and their speech communities, so as to become grammaticalized. Even if it is based on phonetic and acoustic correlates (F0, duration, intensity), intonation is thus part of the phonological system of languages (Gussenhoven 2002), and as such it is subject to variation and change (Guy 1986). Information structure functions in a similar way: all languages have a way of encoding 'new' information - information the speaker thinks the hearer does not know, and 'given' (or 'old') information - information the speaker thinks the hearer already knows (Clark & Haviland 1977, Prince 1981). The encoding of such differences, however, may well be language‐specific. Since there are few cross-linguistic studies considering the importance of information status in intonation (see however Prieto & Roseano 2010), we set out to test two varieties of Spanish: monolingual Mexican Spanish and Chicano Spanish (as spoken by English-Spanish bilingual speakers from California).

Sentence stress is perhaps the most important English suprasegmental. It promotes listener comprehension (L. Hahn, 2004), calls attention to new information (Halliday, 1967), is the only suprasegmental considered essential for ELF communication (Jenkins, 2002) and seems to be quite learnable in research studies examining both production and perception (Muller Levis & Levis, 2011; Muller Levis, Levis & Benner 2014; Pennington & Ellis, 2000). These last two studies examined a very specialized use of sentence stress, contrastive stress (CS), an iconic use of the voice that calls listeners’ attention to how a word is related to other words in a semantic category (Bolinger, 1986). CS can call attention to words that are not normally emphasized, as in (1), and to normally emphasized words with more extreme pitch movement, greater syllable length, and increased intensity, as in (2). In both cases, CS signals narrow focus (Ladd, 1996) as opposed to broad focus, the default use of sentence stress.

1. 
   Did SHE say that?
   

2. 
   I want to LEAVE.
   

CS tends to be taught primarily to advanced students. It also is usually taught simply using rules for which words to emphasize in a text that students read aloud. But several other things also need to be taught:

1. 
   the degree of pitch movement to signal CS
   
2. 
   destressing of any syllables after the CS
   
3. 
   lexico-grammatical structures to express contrasts (Muller Levis, 2012)
   
4. 
   the need for student control over these elements in free speech
   

In this paper, we report on a study in which we taught CS to two classes of intermediate students in an Intensive English program and compared their improvement to a control group. We discuss our reconsideration of teaching materials and our use of nonverbal resources including photos of signs, pictures of places and objects, weather forecast charts, games and numbers. Topics included weather, math sentences, prepositions of place, expressions of size, colors and sequential listing devices. At post-test, students showed significantly better performance. Our success suggests that the iconic use of CS is both teachable and learnable at lower levels of proficiency.

As learners proceduralize their phonological, lexical, and grammatical knowledge of the L2, their ability to produce extemporaneous speech with fewer hesitations, false starts and pauses may improve. Such learning may be a natural consequence of ongoing L2 experience, though several research studies also point to the benefits of instruction focusing on fluency. While many investigations have considered the cognitive underpinnings of oral fluency, relatively little is known about long-term L2 fluency development because few studies have probed oral learning trajectories over extended time periods. In addition, knowledge about the relationship between long-term fluency and pronunciation development is very limited. As part of a 10-year study comparing two groups of Mandarin and Slavic language ESL learners (N = 25 per group at the outset), we collected extemporaneous speech samples at several times. All learners were adult immigrants of low oral proficiency at the beginning of the study, and all were enrolled in similar ESL classes. Speech materials were submitted to perceptual evaluations of fluency, comprehensibility, and accent; in addition, temporal-acoustic measures of fluency were made. While some aspects of pronunciation learning appeared to be constrained by a window of maximal opportunity during the first year of residence in an English-speaking environment, listeners’ judgments, as well as measures of pausing, speech rate, and hesitation phenomena indicated that, for some learners, significant positive changes in fluency continued long after completion of ESL instruction. However, fluency improvement was mitigated by some of the same social and individual factors that also influenced the L2 speakers’ pronunciation development.

Research suggests that pronunciation instruction should be developed and taught in the L2 classroom (Derwing & Munro, 2005; Elliott, 1997) to facilitate production of intelligible and comprehensible utterances in the L2 (Derwing & Munro, 1997). Although accentedness does not always create intelligibility issues, it can be the catalyst to negative NS perceptions of L2 learners’ speech (Derwing & Munro, 2009). One distinctive marker of accent among NSs of English learning Spanish is the duration of aspiration values for the voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ (Lord, 2005). English plosives are realized as [pʰ] [tʰ] [kʰ] the onset position (Hualde, 2011) with long-lag aspiration duration values (Lisker & Abramson, 1964), while durations in Spanish are short-lag (Lisker & Abramson, 1964).

Previous research suggests that the use of visual feedback aids L2 learners in improving various features of pronunciation (deBot, 1983; Saito, 2007), including segmental features in Spanish (Olson & Offerman, 2013). The present study demonstrates that the use of visual feedback treatments aids NSs of American English in producing more target-like realizations of /p, t, k/ in Spanish. A total of three treatments were carried out, which included showing the Experimental group spectrograms of NSs’ and NNSs’ Spanish productions with guided teacher instruction. Generalizability from a controlled task, tokens embedded in a carrier phrase, to less controlled tasks, such as tokens within novel sentences, continuous speech (story task), and spontaneous speech (picture task), were measured for the Experimental and Control groups.

Results conclude that the Experimental group improved their aspiration reduction significantly for each elicitation task from the Pre-test to the Post-test, as well as in comparison to the Pre-test and Post-test results of the Control group. Of particular interest, participants were able to generalize more target-like productions into a spontaneous speech task, or the picture task.

The need for and benefits of pronunciation instruction have been discussed in recent literature with calls for more research on the effectiveness of various approaches and methods for explicit pronunciation instruction (Couper, 2011; Dewing & Munro, 2005; Lord, 2005, 2008; Morin, 2007). This study focuses on upper-level Spanish language students enrolled in a Spanish Phonetics course and the effectiveness of a service project (tutoring sessions for lower-level language students) as a pedagogical tool for improving knowledge and production of target-like speech. The tutoring project (“Pronunciation Clinic”) provided students in this Phonetics class with opportunities to analyze speech, to explore strategies for teaching pronunciation (as many students in the class are Spanish Teaching majors), and to support a peer struggling to improve his/her Spanish conversation skills. In doing so, the semester-long project ultimately aimed to increase the awareness of students' own pronunciation abilities and improve their production. Based on survey and speech-analysis data collected from 16 students who completed pre- and post-questionnaires, pre- and post-audio recordings of their own speech, and reflection journals, this study examines the effect of such a pedagogical tool on students' production and perception as follows: 1) metalinguistic awareness of their own pronunciation (i.e., their ability to identify in their own speech both positive traits and traits that require improvement); 2) changes over time in their attitudes toward Spanish, including their confidence and their motivation to continue to study and improve in their abilities; and 3) changes over time in their pronunciation (i.e., in their production of specific vowels and consonants). In sum, this paper describes the challenges and benefits of this kind of pedagogical innovation for teaching Spanish Phonetics (both in terms of pronunciation outcomes as well as attitudinal measures), offers guidelines for those who may want to apply this approach, and suggests directions for future research.

Minimal pairs, in their highlighting of phonetic contrasts, are used in many areas of language

education such as clinical phonological treatment (Elbert, Rockman, & Saltzman, 1980; Weiner,

1981), pronunciation teaching, research, and materials development (Levis & Cortes, 2008). In

investigations and practices involving minimal pairs, what pairs to select is an important decision. Practitioners and researchers in general tend to let learner needs inform their choices so that words are not selected randomly but in a principled way with attention given to word frequency and positional variation of the phoneme. This process on the one hand improves the suitability of the selected words for learners with specific proficiency levels and linguistic backgrounds. On the other hand, it can get laborious especially if approached manually — as is frequently the case.
This presentation introduces a system written in Perl that automates minimal-pair selection. With variables such as L1 background, word frequency and syllable environment controlled, the

system can identify, select, and extract minimal pairs automatically from the Carnegie Mellon

University Pronouncing Dictionary, a public domain dictionary used as a standard reference for

over 15 years. The selections follow Swan and Smith’s (2001) phonology guide. This guide was

chosen as the theoretical framework because it values learner-centeredness and recognizes that

students speaking different mother tongues struggle with distinct pronunciation errors. Using the system, minimal pairs are respectively generated for English learners with different mother

languages (e.g. Dutch, German, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Korean). These minimal pairs are

directly applicable to classroom and research use. Minimal pairs can also be easily generated for

additional learner groups by the system if error lists for their native languages similar to those in

Swan and Smith (2001) are input.

conscious minimal-pair selections that cater to diverse learner needs, which ultimately promotes learner motivation and outcomes (Nunan, 1988; Rodgers, 1969).

articulation training: clinician manual. Austin, Texas: Exceptional Resources.

assessment and teaching. In C. A. Chapelle, Y.-R. Chung, & J. Xu (Eds.), Towards

adaptive CALL: Natural language processing for diagnostic language assessment, 197-

208. Ames, IA: Iowa State University.

Rogers, C. R. (1969). Freedom to learn: A view of what education might become. Columbus:

Charles E. Merrill.
Swan, M., & Smith, B. (2001). Learner English: A teacher's guide to interference and other

problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

While a great bulk research in second-language speech has concentrated on vowels and consonants as constituting a segmental composition of words, considerably fewer studies have looked into the acquisition of temporal and spectral properties that are exploited to signal word boundaries in the target language. In the case of C#V sequences of Polish learners, this task is complicated by the details of realization of target language voicing contrasts. When the final consonant is voiced, English shows a kind of liaison processes, by which find out may be indistinguishable from fine doubt. When the final consonant is voiceless, the liaison process is not so absolute; the /k/ in like old is not typically produced with aspiration as it is in lie cold. In both cases, however, glottalization of word-initial vowels, typical in Polish, blocks syllabic reorganization of words separated by a word boundary. Moreover, in find out, glottalization reinforces the context for a feature typical of Polish-accented English: final devoicing.

Greek, Japanese, and Spanish all have a five-vowel inventory. Adult native speakers (NSs) of these languages often have a difficult time learning English, because their first language (L1) vowel space must expand to accommodate twelve English monophthongs. Many studies have investigated the difficulty NSs of Spanish face when trying to perceive and produce the English vowel contrasts that do not exist in their native language (e.g., Cenoz & Garcia Lecumberri, 1999; Iverson & Evans, 2009), but very few have looked at the vowel productions of NSs of other languages with a similar vowel system (e.g., Lengeris & Hazan, 2010). By observing the second language (L2) vowel productions across multiple language groups, we can better understand how the vowel space is constrained by the quantity of L1 vowel categories.