Ron I. Thomson

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN L1 FLUENCY AND L2 FLUENCY DEVELOPMENT

A fundamental question in the study of second language (L2) fluency is the extent to which temporal characteristics of speakers’ first language (L1) productions predict the same characteristics in the L2. A close relationship between a speaker’s L1 and L2 temporal characteristics would suggest that fluency is governed by an underlying trait. This longitudinal investigation compared L1 and L2 English fluency at three times over 2 years in Russian- and Ukrainian- (which we will refer to here as Slavic) and Mandarin-speaking adult immigrants to Canada. Fluency ratings of narratives by trained judges indicated a relationship between the L1 and the L2 in the initial stages of L2 exposure, although this relationship was found to be stronger in the Slavic than in the Mandarin learners. Pauses per second, speech rate, and pruned syllables per second were all related to the listeners’ judgments in both languages, although vowel durations were not. Between-group differences may reflect differential exposure to spoken English and a closer relationship between Slavic languages and English than between Mandarin and English. Suggestions for pedagogical interventions and further research are also proposed.

A modified statistical pattern recognition approach to measuring the crosslinguistic similarity of Mandarin and English vowels

This study describes a statistical approach to measuring crosslinguistic vowel similarity and assesses its efficacy in predicting L2 learner behavior. In the first experiment, using linear discriminant analysis, relevant acoustic variables from vowel productions of L1 Mandarin and L1 English speakers were used to train a statistical pattern recognition model that simultaneously comprised both Mandarin and English vowel categories. The resulting model was then used to determine what categories novel Mandarin and English vowel productions most resembled. The extent to which novel cases were classified as members of a competing language category provided a means for assessing the crosslinguistic similarity of Mandarin and English vowels. In a second experiment, L2 English learners imitated English vowels produced by a native speaker of English. The statistically defined similarity between Mandarin and English vowels quite accurately predicted L2 learner behavior; the English vowel elicitation stimuli deemed most similar to Mandarin vowels were more likely to elicit L2 productions that were recognized as a Mandarin category; English stimuli that were less similar to Mandarin vowels were more likely to elicit L2 productions that were recognized as new or emerging categories.

English vowel learning by speakers of Mandarin

One of the most influential models of second language (L2) speech perception and production [Flege, Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience (York, Baltimore, 1995) pp. 233–277] argues that during initial stages of L2 acquisition, perceptual categories sharing the same or nearly the same acoustic space as first language (L1) categories will be processed as members of that L1 category. Previous research has generally been limited to testing these claims on binary L2 contrasts, rather than larger portions of the perceptual space. This study examines the development of 10 English vowel categories by 20 Mandarin L1 learners of English. Imitation of English vowel stimuli by these learners, at 6 data collection points over the course of one year, were recorded. Using a statistical pattern recognition model, these productions were then assessed against native speaker norms. The degree to which the learners’ perception/production shifted toward the target English vowels and the degree to which they matched L1 ...

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary English Pronunciation

rules and representations (such as those found in Chomsky & Halle, 1968). Let us take an example from stress placement. As any learner of English knows, the patterns of English stress placement are complex: robúst, énter, cínema, Appalàchicóla. Chomsky and Halle’s main stress rule was one of the first successful attempts to find patterns in English stress placement. To paraphrase and simplify (ignoring nouns): For verbs or adjectives, assign primary stress to the final vowel of the word if the word ends in a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by a consonant; otherwise stress the penultimate syllable. As Kaye (1990) pointed out: if this is a possible rule, what isn’t? The point to be made here is that, when looking at proposals like the main stress rule, linguists began to realize that grammatical models must be learnable based on the input that the learners are exposed to. It was no longer enough to find the patterns in the data. From this point on, linguistic theory began to offer real insights into the study of both first and second language acquisition. The rules proposed give us descriptions of where the L2 learner starts, where they want to end up and what their intermediate system looks like. J. Archibald

Incongruence in second language vowel perception and production

Nearey’s work on double-weak theory has brought to the fore the conceptualization of native-language (L1) speech perception and production as autonomous subsystems. In second-language (L2) phonetics research, the perception-production relationship is also a central concern, although the facilitating and hampering effects of a previously learned phonological inventory must be taken into account (Flege, 2003). Some current views of L2 phonetic learning assume that a reorganization of perceptual knowledge normally comes first, and that production eventually falls into line with perceptual representations (Huensch, 2013; Thomson, 2011, 2013). However, the available data point to a number of complexities in the relationship that have yet to be accounted for. In the present report, we synthesize new data on vowel perception and production by English learners from a variety of L1 backgrounds. Among the key findings are that (1) perceptual training on vowels in particular phonetic contexts leads to very limited t...

Speaker and listener variables affecting second language vowel intelligibility.

Research investigating the development of second language (L2) phonology often relies on native speaker evaluation of L2 productions. However, listener variables that might affect these judgments remain little understood. For example, Levi et al. (2007) argued that the lexical frequency of L2 speech tokens influences listeners. However, they used somewhat incommensurate measures to compare listener vis‐a‐vis speaker variables. The present study investigates the impact of speaker and listener variables on English vowel intelligibility using three distinct listening tasks and compares three speaker groups: first language (L1) English, L1 Mandarin, and L1 Slavic. Speakers repeated a word list comprising 10 target English vowels, each embedded in three separate monosyllabic verbs and varying in terms of lexical familiarity for speakers and lexical frequency for listeners. L1 English judges identified the recorded vowels in two conditions that included lexical information, and one condition in which the vowel portions of the recorded words were presented in isolation, preventing listener reference to the vowels’ lexical context. Results indicate an interaction between lexical familiarity for speakers, speaking prompt type, and intelligibility scores. Lexical frequency for listeners did not impact intelligibility scores.

Lexical frequency, orthographic information, and first‐language effects on second‐language pronunciation.

In L2 speech learning, lexical frequency may play a facilitative role, whereby perception and production of sounds found in high‐frequency lexical items will develop before the perception and production of the same categories found in low‐frequency lexical items (see Munro and Derwing, 2008). Orthographic information may also facilitate learning by disambiguating L2 sounds (see Erdener and Burnham, 2005), particularly in known words. This study examines the role of lexical frequency, orthographic information, and a learner’s L1 in the development of L2 speech perception and production. Thirty‐eight Mandarin and Slavic participants were asked to repeat a word list comprising ten target English vowels, each embedded in three separate monosyllabic verbs and varying in lexical frequency. Recordings of the L2 productions were obtained under three counter‐balanced conditions: (1) after hearing an auditory prompt accompanied by the written form of the word; (2) after hearing an auditory prompt with no written fo...

Categorization of a sibilant+vowel continuum in Japanese, Mandarin, and English

A continuum of 168 synthetic sibilant+vowel stimuli was categorized by listeners of three languages (Japanese, Mandarin, and English). The contoid portion of each stimulus consisted of a 190‐ms high‐pass filtered white noise whose cutoff frequency varied from 1800 to 3800 Hz in 7 steps. (Signals were low‐pass filtered at 8500 Hz before resampling to 22.05 kHz for playback.) Each (cascade formant) vocoid portion was 210 ms in duration varying in three F1 levels (from 300 to 430 Hz) crossed with four F2 levels (from 850 to 2100 Hz, with fixed F3 through F5). Each of the 84 noise+vocoid patterns was combined with two different F2 transition patterns, designed to slightly favor more alveolar or more palatal fricative responses. Appropriate response sets were determined in pilot studies for each language by native speakers on the research team. Corresponding software was designed to allow computer‐controlled categorization. Data collection for 9 Japanese, 20 Mandarin, and 4 English listeners is complete (more ...