Angelos Lengeris

Perceptual Assimilation and L2 Learning: Evidence from the Perception of Southern British English Vowels by Native Speakers of Greek and Japanese

This study examined the extent to which previous experience with duration in first language (L1) vowel distinctions affects the use of duration when perceiving vowels in a second language (L2). Native speakers of Greek (where duration is not used to differentiate vowels) and Japanese (where vowels are distinguished by duration) first identified and rated the eleven English monophthongs, embedded in /bVb/ and /bVp/ contexts, in terms of their L1 categories and then carried out discrimination tests on those English vowels. The results demonstrated that both L2 groups were sensitive to durational cues when perceiving the English vowels. However, listeners were found to temporally assimilate L2 vowels to L1 category/categories. Temporal information was available in discrimination only when the listeners’ L1 duration category/categories did not interfere with the target duration categories and hence the use of duration in such cases cannot be attributed to its perceptual salience as has been proposed.

Prosody and Second Language Teaching: Lessons from L2 Speech Perception and Production Research

Despite the well-attested importance of prosody in second language (L2) learning and the development of widely accessible software packages that can be used for analysing the prosodic aspects of speech, the teaching of L2 prosody is usually neglected in classroom settings. This article reviews important findings from L2 speech perception and production research that can be of use to teachers and practitioners involved in language pedagogy. What these findings demonstrate is that (a) L2 speech learning in general, as well as L2 intonation learning in particular, is feasible even in adulthood and (b) computer-assisted training with highly-variable auditory feedback and visual feedback in the form of pitch tracks can facilitate learning. Freely available acoustic analysis programs developed by the research community that can be used for teaching L2 intonation will also be discussed.

Native language influences on the production of second-language prosody

This study examined native language (L1) transfer effects on the production of second-language (L2) prosody by intermediate Greek learners of English, specifically the set of tonal events and their alignment, speech rate, pitch span and pitch level in English polar questions. Greek uses an L* L+H- L% melody giving rise to a low–high–low f0 contour at the end of the polar question that does not resemble any of the contours used by native speakers in English polar questions. The results showed that the Greek speakers transferred the full set of Greek tonal events into English associating them with stressed syllables, and consistently placed the focus on the verb. The Greek speakers also anchored the peak of the phrase accent in polar questions around the midpoint of the stressed vowel across L1/L2 despite using longer vowel durations in L2. At the same time, their productions deviated from L1 forms in terms of speech rate (slower in L2), pitch span (narrower in L2) and pitch level (lower in L2), indicating that even when learners adopt an L1 prosodic feature in their L2, they still produce interlanguage forms that deviate from L1.

The Acquisition of English Intonation by Native Greek Speakers

This study examined the production of English intonation by Greek second language (L2) learners of English, specifically their production of polar questions and their pitch range in English. Productions of (a) comparable materials in Greek spoken by the same Greek speakers and (b) English materials spoken by native English speakers were used to assess phonological and phonetic native language (L1) transfer when learning an L2. The results showed that Greek speakers used their L1 (Greek) intonation in English polar questions. Greek speakers’ pitch span in English was narrower from both their L1 (Greek) and from the target (English) pitch span.