Richards, Monica (Iowa State University)

 

Sands, Kathy (SIL)

The study investigated the acquisition of the phonological rule of word final devoicing by American learners of Russian and sought to answer whether articulatory features, such as place of articulation, manner of articulation and palatalization had an effect on the degree of voicing preserved in the final obstruents. The participants of the study were 20 American learners of Russian. The materials of the study constituted 20 pseudowords of a CVC structure. The phonetic environment was thoroughly controlled. Minimal pairs were excluded to avoid task effects. The target words were matched to pictures of real objects that were assigned different meanings related to the topic of space traveling. The participants had to memorize the target words for further elicitation. Pictures were used to reduce the possible effects of orthography. In order to memorize the words, the participants had to go through a word-learning stage that included four exercises. Then the participants performed a picture-naming task. The results suggested that learners could not fully acquire the rule of word final devoicing in Russian. The influence of learners’ native English phonology, which allows voicing contrasts word- finally, was observed in the productions of word final obstruents. Stops retained significantly more voicing than fricatives and palatalized consonants were consistently more devoiced than plain consonants. Place of articulation did not have a straightforward effect on the degree of voicing in the final obstruents, however, some tendencies and interactions were observed in the data.

Liaison of words with latent final consonants to words beginning with vowels has proven difficult for learners of French as an L2. Yet appropriate use of liaison is important for intelligibility as well as appropriate register. The present research examines the effect of a series of lessons introducing and explaining liaison on intermediate learners of L2 French. Two groups of FR 301 (5th semester) students recorded a text at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. One group received explicit liaison instruction while the other did not. Results are interpreted in light of Schmidt’s (1990; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 2001) and Robinson’s (1995; 2003) work on attention and awareness in L2 learning.

Jenkins, Jennifer. 2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1. 
   The value and limitations of read-aloud tasks
   
2. 
   The use of free speech in pronunciation diagnostics
   
3. 
   “Atomistic” vs. holistic rating
   
4. 
   The development of rating scales reflecting the aforementioned paradigm shift from accentedness to comprehensibility
   
5. 
   Relating intelligibility findings to the creation of test items and the rating of speech samples
   
6. 
   The suitability of test items for use with examinees from multiple language backgrounds, especially for the segmental level
   

Isaacs, T. (2014). Assessing pronunciation. In Antony Kunnan (Ed.) The Companion to Language Assessment, 140-155. Alden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.

Levis, J. (2005). Changing contexts and shifting paradigms in pronunciation teaching. TESOL Quarterley, 39, 369-377.

Munro, M. & Derwing, T. (2006). The functional load principle in ESL pronunciation instruction: An exploratory study. System, 34, 520-531.

The realization of narrow focus in L2 Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language and sentence level prominence is expressed mainly by expanding pitch range, intensity and duration but not changing the lexical tone contours (Chen 2004; Flemming 2008). The acquisition of Mandarin focus marking poses a difficult challenge for non-tonal language speakers, such as English, Japanese and Korean which represent three types of non-tonal languages (stress-accent languages, pitch-accent languages and non-stress non-pitch accent languages).

This study examines the second language (L2) tonal productions of Chinese mono-syllabic narrow focus implemented by 20 American English-speaking learners, 20 Tokyo Japanese-speaking learners and 20 Korean-speaking learners. It is found that Japanese speakers’ general accuracy rate is higher than English and Korean speakers’. In terms of individual tones, all groups show the greatest accuracy with the target Mandarin high-falling tone (T4). However, when errors occur, English-speaking learners demonstrate an obvious preference of T4 to substitute for target tones, which reflects the L1 transfer of accented pitch tone H*L. Japanese-speaking learners usually lengthen low tones and use Mandarin low dipping tone (Full-T3) in substitutions. Korean speakers don’t show obvious preference of tones. This study argues that the frequent use of low pitch in focus marking by Japanese and Korean speakers may not be ascribed to L1 but due to the unmarkedness of low tones (Ohala 1978; Yip 2002). It represents the situation of “the Emergence of the Unmarked” in the context of L2 acquisition (Broselow et al., 1998). That is, these error patterns in L2 acquisition could neither have been learned from L2 input alone nor derived from the L1 grammar patterns but reveal universally preferred tone structures. This study concludes that the effects of L1 transfer and the “emergence of the unmarked” (McCarthy and Prince, 1994) co-construct the non-tonal language speakers’ interlanguage tone grammars for sentence focus marking.

Selected References:

Broselow, E., et al. (1987) "The perception of second language prosody," Interlanguage Phonology: 350-362.

Chen, Y-Y. (2004). Focus and Intonational Phrase Boundary in Standard Chinese. ISCA Archive. International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP 2004).

Flemming, E. (2008) The role of pitch range in focus marking. Slides from a talk given at the Workshop on Information Structure and Prosody, Studiecentrum Soeterbeeck (2008).

Jun, S-A. (2005). Korean Intonational Phonology and Prosodic Transcription. in Jun, S-A. (eds.) Prosodic Typology. pp.201-230. Oxford, UK.

McCarthy, J. & A.Prince (1994) The Emergence of the Unmarked: Optimality in Prosodic Morphology.

Ohala, J. J. (1978). Production of Tone. In Tone: A Linguistic Survey. P. 3-39.

Venditti, J.,et al.(2008) Prominence marking in the Japanese intonation system. Handbook of Japanese Ling.

Yip, M. (2002). Tone. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.

Zhuang, Yuan (Northern Arizona University)

Examining the Effectiveness of Teaching English Intonation to Brazilian ESL Learners

This study investigates the effectiveness of using a computer program , Praat, to help Brazilian ESL learners improve their ability to use English intonation in communication. Recent research suggests that intonation and other suprasegmental features of pronunciation may have significant effects on oral proficiency and comprehensibility (e.g., Derwing & Munro, 1997, 1998; Kang, 2010b, 2013). However, studies on the effectiveness of suprasegmentals teaching have not been able to reach a satisfactory level of consensus on how intonation can be effectively taught (e.g., Anderson-Hsieh, 1992; Levis & Pickering, 2004) in classroom. Previous studies have chosen the ESL learners of Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish, but researchers have paid very little attention to examine the English intonation produced by Portuguese L1 speakers. Portuguese speakers are generally considered to have similar problems in intonation as the Spanish speakers (Avery & Ehrlich, 1992). In this study, 32 ESL learners from Brazil were recruited and divided into two groups: one treatment group (n = 16) and one comparison group (n = 16). The treatment group received a four-week (eight hours in total) perception training of English intonation patterns and the communication functions of intonation. The comparison group received no training. A pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the development of the ESL learners’ intonation production. It is expected that a significant group difference of intonation production will be found after training. The study will provide support that ESL learners can develop intonation production through explicit perception training. It will also show the positive effects of Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Teaching, and provide implications for English teachers to better understand and teach English suprasegmental features.