LINGUIST List 14.2268

Thu Aug 28 2003

Diss: Psycholing/Phonetic/Lang Acq: Steinlen

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • steinlen, A cross-linguistic comparison

    Message 1: A cross-linguistic comparison

     Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 06:19:08 +0000
    From: steinlen <steinlensitkom.sdu.dk>
    Subject: A cross-linguistic comparison


    Institution: University of Aarhus, Denmark Program: Department of English Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2002

    Author: Anja K. Steinlen

    Dissertation Title: A cross-linguistic comparison of the effects of consonantal contexts on vowels produced by native and non-native speakers

    Linguistic Field: Psycholinguistics Phonetics Language Acquisition

    Subject Language: German, Standard (code: GER ) English (code: ENG ) Danish (code: DNS )

    Dissertation Director 1: Ocke Schwen Bohn Dissertation Director 2: James E. Flege Dissertation Director 3: Thorsten Piske Dissertation Director 4: Dawn Behne

    Dissertation Abstract:

    This dissertation examines the effect of consonantal context on the production of native vowels (in Southern British English, Danish, and North German) and of non-native vowels (Southern British English vowels as produced by native speakers of Danish and of North German).

    The data for this study were elicited from 10 male talkers each in the three native and two non-native speaker groups. Vowels were recorded in /bVt/, /bVp/, /dVt/, and /gVk/ contexts in comparable sentence frames and in a /hVt/ context produced in citation form. The focus of this study was on the measurements of F1 and F2 at temporal vowel midpoint (50% of vowel duration) and throughout the vocalic nucleus (i.e., at 25% and 75% of vowel duration), and on absolute and relative vowel durations.

    The results of this study suggest that the extent to which the production of vowels is influenced by adjacent consonants is language-specific: The spectral properties of the English and German vowels (but not of Danish vowels) were considerably affected by consonantal context. This study also showed that expectations about language-specific patterns of coarticulation were transferred from the native to the non-native language: In contrast to English, the temporal but not the spectral values of Danish-accented English vowels were strongly affected by consonantal context. The results, however, also indicated that some consonantal context effects are learnable, as in the case of Danish-accented English back vowels in the alveolar context. This study also shows that comparisons of phonetic symbols can be misleading in cross-language comparisons of vowels. Acoustic analyses revealed a) that identically transcribed vowels of two languages may differ greatly in their spectral properties (e.g., English /u:/ and Danish /u:/) and b) that differently transcribed vowels may have the same acoustic vowel quality (e.g., the English vowel in 'hut' and the German vowel in 'hat'). Languages apparently also differ as to how they exploit vowel-inherent spectral change in their vowel inventory (e.g. English /u:/ vs. Danish /u:/), which may also contribute to the degree of foreign accent in non-native speakers' vowel production (e.g., the lack of diphthongisation in Danish-accented English /u:/).

    In conclusion, the results of this study suggest that languages differ in the extent to which flanking consonants affect the acoustic properties of vowels and that L2 learners typically transfer the language-specific coarticulatory patterns of vowel production in their native language to a non-native language.