Murray J. Munro

Effects of age of second-language learning on the production of English consonants

Abstract This study examined the production of English consonants by native speakers of Italian. The 240 adult native Italian speakers of English who participated had begun learning English when they emigrated to Canada between the ages of 2 and 23 years. Word-initial, word-medial and word-final tokens of English stops and fricatives were assessed through forced-choice judgments made by native English-speaking listeners, and acoustically. The native Italian subjects ages of learning (AOL) English exerted a systematic effect on their production of English consonants even though they had lived in Canada for an average of 32 years, and reported speaking English more than Italian. In all but two instances, one or more native Italian subgroup defined on the basis of AOL differed significantly from subjects in a native English (NE) control group. The AOL of the first native Italian subgroup to differ from the NE subjects varied across consonant and syllable position. The results are discussed in terms of hypotheses proposed in the literature concerning the basis of segmental errors in L2 speech production.

Evaluations of foreign accent in extemporaneous and read material

Previous research has yielded apparently contradictory evidence about whether the utterances of second language learners are likely to be perceived as more foreign accented when the speech material has been read or produced extemporaneously. One difficulty with some previous studies is that different test material was used under the two speaking conditions. It is possible that, in some studies, utterances read by L2 learners were evaluated as more accented than extemporaneous speech, not because speakers were unable to implement knowledge about individual segments or prosodic features when under pressure to read in the L2 (as has been supposed), but because of a higher frequency of errors or even a reduction in fluency as a result of less familiarity with vocabulary or syntactic structures, or a preponderance of relatively difficult phones in the reading material. In this study, native Mandarin speakers produced extemporaneous narratives and then read transcriptions of their own utterances. An analysis of accentedness ratings from native English judges revealed no advantage for the speakers in the extemporaneous speaking condition. However, evidence was obtained in support of the hypothesis that familiarity with particular non-native speech samples and/or speakers may lead to perceptions of greater foreign- accentedness.