Identification of the place of articulation of trilingual postvocalic nasals and stops by native speakers of American English, Korean and Japanese.

This is a preliminary study in which we investigate the acquisition of English as second language (L2[1]) word stress by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1[2]). In this paper, we show results of a multiple choice forced choice perception test in which native speakers of American English and native speakers of Dutch judged the production of English words bearing pre-final stress that were both cognates and non-cognates with BP words. The tokens were produced by native speakers of American English and by Brazilians that speak English as a second language. The results have shown that American and Dutch listeners were consistent in their judgments on native and non-native stress productions and both speakers' groups produced variation in stress in relation to the canonical pattern. However, the variability found in American English points to the prosodic patterns of English and the variability found in Brazilian English points to the stress patterns of Portuguese. It occurs especially in words whose forms activate neighboring similar words in the L1. Transfer from the L1 appears both at segmental and prosodic levels in BP English. [1] L2 stands for second language, foreign language, target language. [2] L1 stands for first language, mother tongue, source language.

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Relationship between the target word form and children’s productions: place of articulation in Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (C1VC2) words in American English

Phonetica ◽

10.1515/phon-2019-0061 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 78 (1) ◽

pp. 65-94

Author(s):

Katsura Aoyama ◽

Barbara L. Davis

Keyword(s):

Target Word ◽

American English ◽

English Word ◽

Word Form ◽

Single Word ◽

Place Of Articulation ◽

Target Words

Abstract The aim of the present study was to investigate relationships between characteristics of children’s target words and their actual productions during the single-word period in American English. Word productions in spontaneous and functional speech from 18 children acquiring American English were analyzed. Consonant sequences in 3,328 consonant-vowel-consonant (C1VC2) target words were analyzed in terms of global place of articulation (labials, coronals, and dorsals). Children’s actual productions of place sequences were compared between target words containing repeated place sequences (e.g., mom, map, dad, not) and target words containing variegated place sequences (e.g., mat, dog, cat, nap). Overall, when the target word contained two consonants at the same global place of articulation (e.g., labial-labial, map; coronal-coronal, not), approximately 50% of children’s actual productions matched consonant place characteristics. Conversely, when the target word consisted of variegated place sequences (e.g., mat, dog, cat, nap), only about 20% of the productions matched the target consonant sequences. These results suggest that children’s actual productions are influenced by their own production abilities as well as by the phonetic forms of target words.

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A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of the Logical Connector ‘Thus’ in the Academic Writing of Turkish EFL Learners

English Language Teaching ◽

10.5539/elt.v10n2p64 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 64

Author(s):

Serpil Ucar ◽

Ceyhun Yukselir

Keyword(s):

Likelihood Ratio ◽

Academic Writing ◽

Native Speakers ◽

American English ◽

Advanced Learners ◽

Efl Learners ◽

Log Likelihood ◽

Log Likelihood Ratio ◽

Effect Relation ◽

Academic Genre

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary American English and 20 scientific articles of native speakers as control corpora, and 20 scientific articles of Turkish advanced EFL learners. The raw frequencies, frequencies per million words, frequencies per text and log-likelihood ratio were measured so as to compare varieties across the three corpora. The findings revealed that Turkish learners of English showed underuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose compared to native speakers. Additionally, they did not demonstrate misuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’. Nevertheless, non-native learners of English tended to use this connector in a resultative role (cause-effect relation) more frequently whereas native speakers used it in appositional and summative roles more as well as its resultative role. Furthermore, the most frequent occurrences of ‘thus’ have been in academic genre.

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An accent reduction course for native speakers of American English learning Korean

Studies in Phonetics Phonology and Morphology ◽

10.17959/sppm.2012.18.1.27 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 18 (1) ◽

pp. 27-50

Author(s):

김종미

Keyword(s):

Native Speakers ◽

American English ◽

English Learning ◽

Accent Reduction

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The acoustic characteristics of non-native American English vowels

Linguistica ◽

10.4312/linguistica.57.1.59-72 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 57 (1) ◽

pp. 59-72

Author(s):

Biljana Čubrović

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Native American ◽

Native Speakers ◽

American English ◽

The United States ◽

Vowel Quality ◽

Acoustic Characteristics ◽

Language Background ◽

English Vowels ◽

Native Speech

This study aims at discussing the phonetic property of vowel quality in English, as exercised by both native speakers of General American English (AE) and non-native speakers of General American English of Serbian language background, all residents of the United States. Ten Serbian male speakers and four native male speakers of AE are recorded in separate experiments and their speech analyzed acoustically for any significant phonetic differences, looking into a set of monosyllabic English words representing nine vowels of AE. The general aim of the experiments is to evaluate the phonetic characteristics of AE vowels, with particular attention to F1 and F2 values, investigate which vowels differ most in the two groups of participants, and provide some explanations for these variations. A single most important observation that is the result of this vowel study is an evident merger of three pairs of vowels in the non-native speech: /i ɪ/, /u ʊ/, and /ɛ æ/.

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Language Experience and Subjective Word Familiarity on the Multimodal Perception of Non-Native Speakers’ Vowels

Language and Speech ◽

10.1177/0023830921998723 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002383092199872

Author(s):

Solène Inceoglu

Keyword(s):

English Learners ◽

Visual Information ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Native Speaker ◽

American English ◽

Vocabulary Knowledge ◽

Language Experience ◽

Monosyllabic Words ◽

Word Familiarity ◽

Multimodal Perception

The present study investigated native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ perception of the French vowels /ɔ̃, ɑ̃, ɛ̃, o/. Thirty-four American-English learners of French and 33 native speakers of Parisian French were asked to identify 60 monosyllabic words produced by a native speaker in three modalities of presentation: auditory-only (A-only); audiovisual (AV); and visual-only (V-only). The L2 participants also completed a vocabulary knowledge test of the words presented in the perception experiment that aimed to explore whether subjective word familiarity affected speech perception. Results showed that overall performance was better in the AV and A-only conditions for the two groups with the pattern of confusion differing across modalities. The lack of audiovisual benefit was not due to the vowel contrasts being not visually salient enough, as shown by the native group’s performance in the V-only modality, but to the L2 group’s weaker sensitivity to visual information. Additionally, a significant relationship was found between subjective word familiarity and AV and A-only (but not V-only) perception of non-native contrasts.

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Native Speakers Pronunciation of Foreign Names

Babel ◽

10.1075/babel.46.3.05ros ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 46 (3) ◽

pp. 245-259

Author(s):

Judith Rosenhouse

Keyword(s):

Foreign Language ◽

Field Study ◽

Native Speakers ◽

American English ◽

Wide Spread ◽

Personal Names ◽

The Usa ◽

Native Speakers Of English ◽

Phonetic Features ◽

Language Environment

Due to various reasons, proper names (personal names) are often considered a separate group within the noun category of a language. Nowadays, foreign names are much more wide-spread, perhaps, than ever before. This fact causes pronunciation difficulties to speakers in the native-language environment. Moreover, the foreign origin of a name remains long after an individual’s immigration, and many foreign names are integrated into the absorbing language. Two problem areas arise for speakers of a certain language who have to pronounce foreign names: on the written modality level, letter-to-sound correspondence, and on the aural modality, the pronunciation of the foreign name (according to the speaker’s L1). These issues require decisions about phonological and phonetic features of the foreign language which are to be adopted or discarded in pronouncing a name. Based on our field study, various solutions of these problems are here described and discussed. It appears that native speakers of English (not only American English, as our study reveals) do not base their decisions only on the graphic form of the names (letter sequences); their experience with other languages affects their productions. In addition, not all letter sequences yield identical pronunciation decisions. Thus, solutions are not uniform. Examples are given from French surnames and personal names that occur in English in the USA.

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