English Lexical Stress Production by Native Speakers of Tibetan and Uyghur

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Dan Hu ◽  
Hui Feng ◽  
Yingjie Zhao ◽  
Jie Lian
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Lexical Stress

Glottalization and linking in the L2 speech of Czech learners of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832110158
Author(s):  
Radek Skarnitzl ◽  
Petr Čermák ◽  
Pavel Šturm ◽  
Zora Obstová ◽  
Jan Hricsina
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression Model ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
The Other ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Short Text ◽  
Sound Pattern ◽  
Frequent Use

The use of linking or glottalization contributes to the characteristic sound pattern of a language, and the use of one in place of the other may affect a speaker’s comprehensibility and fluency in certain contexts. In this study, native speakers of Czech, a language that is associated with a frequent use of glottalization in vowel-initial word onsets, are examined in the second language (L2) context of three Romance languages that predominantly employ linking between words (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese). In total, 29 native speakers and 51 non-native learners were asked to read a short text in the respective language. The learners were divided into two groups based on their experience with the target language. A number of other factors were examined in a mixed-effects logistic regression model (segmental context, lexical stress, prosodic breaks, and the semantic status of the words). The main results show that, regardless of the target language, the more experienced (ME) learners displayed significantly lower rates of glottalization than the less experienced (LE) learners, but significantly higher rates than native speakers. The pedagogical implications of the results are discussed.

PHONETIC INFLUENCES ON ENGLISH AND FRENCH LISTENERS’ ASSIMILATION OF MANDARIN TONES TO NATIVE PROSODIC CATEGORIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie K. So ◽  
Catherine T. Best
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Pitch Contours ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Australian English ◽  
Mandarin Tones ◽  
Prosodic Categories ◽  
Mandarin Tone

This study examined how native speakers of Australian English and French, nontone languages with different lexical stress properties, perceived Mandarin tones in a sentence environment according to their native sentence intonation categories (i-Categories) in connected speech. Results showed that both English and French speakers categorized Mandarin tones primarily on the phonetic similarities of the pitch contours between the Mandarin tones and their native i-Categories. Moreover, French but not English speakers were able to detect the fine-detailed phonetic differences between Tone 3 (T3) and Tone 4 (T4; i.e., low or low-falling tone vs. high-falling tone), which suggests that the stress differences between these languages may affect nonnative tone perception: English uses lexical stress, whereas French does not. In the discrimination task, the French listeners’ performance was better than that of the English listeners. For each group, discrimination of the Tone 1 (T1)–T4 and Tone 2 (T2)–T3 pairs was consistently and significantly lower than that of the other tone pairs, and the difference between T1-T4 and T2-T3 was significant. Discrimination of the Mandarin tone pairs was not fully predicted by pairwise categorizations to native i-Categories, however. Some discrimination differences were observed among tone pairs showing the same assimilation patterns. Phonetic overlaps in native i-Category choices for the Mandarin tones, strength of categorization (So, 2012), and tonal coarticulation effects (Xu, 1994, 1997) may offer possible accounts of these discrepancies between categorization and discrimination performance. These findings support the perceptual assimilation model for suprasegmentals (So & Best, 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2013), extended to categorization of nonnative tone words within sentence contexts to native i-Categories.

scholarly journals REASONS FOR MISTAKES IN FOREIGN SPEECH PERCEPTION: BASED ON RUSSIAN AND CHINESE

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Bai Xuhaoran ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Listening Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
Connected Speech ◽  
Negative Interference ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Sentence Patterns

Fluencyin a foreignlanguagepresupposesadvancementinvariousskills. When learning a foreign language, listening is one of the most difficult types of language practices for non-native speakers. The results of the present research based on the survey of 52 Chinese and 50 Russian L2 learners, aged 18-28 (Bachelor, Master and PhD levels) in Chelyabinsk support this viewpoint. The current paper analyzes the causes of mistakes in listening comprehension made by Chinese learners of Russian and Russian learners of Chinese. The causes can be of psychological nature (anxiety and the lack of motivation), of linguistic nature reflected on the phonetic (number of sounds, syllable tone vs lexical stress, connected speech processes), lexicographic, lexical-grammatical (the lack of vocabulary, differences of grammatical categories and syntactic sentence patterns) levels, as well as the lack of knowledge regarding cultural realities. These mistakes are a naturally expected as a result of the negative interference of the mother tongue.

Perception of lexical stress in Spanish L2 by French speakers

2018 ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Joaquim Llisterri ◽  
Sandra Schwab
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Native Spanish Speakers

Three experiments on the perception of lexical stress in Spanish (a free-stress language) by speakers of French (a fixed-stress language) are discussed in this chapter. The main goal of these experiments is to further investigate the effect of an ‘accentual filter’ that may lead to a stress ‘deafness’ in native speakers of a fixed-stress language. Taken together, the results of the three experiments lead to the conclusion that French speakers are not only sensitive to the acoustic cues that convey stress prominences in Spanish, but are also able, after a short training, to encode and retrieve the accentual information in a small lexicon of Spanish pseudowords. However, it appears that French listeners do not always rely on the same acoustic cues as the ones used by native Spanish speakers and that their representations of the accentual patterns seem to be less flexible than the native ones.

Music training and the use of songs or rhythm: Do they help for lexical stress processing?

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Degrave
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
Teaching Material ◽  
Accuracy Rate ◽  
Music Training ◽  
Stress Processing ◽  
Musical Characteristics

AbstractPrevious studies revealed that musicians outperformed non-musicians in different language tasks and that the use of music or rhythm in teaching material can benefit language learning. Here, we examined whether music, as a learner’s characteristic (musicians/non-musicians) or as a characteristic of the task (use of music or beat) can facilitate foreign language lexical stress processing. 25 non-musician and 21 musician French native speakers performed a discrimination task in which stimuli were either naturally spoken, spoken with a beat on the lexical stress, or sung. The participants heard 96 stimuli of three Dutch (non)words varying in the lexical stress position and mentioned which of the last two words was pronounced as the first. The results show that musicians outperformed non-musicians, that the accuracy rate is higher for sung stimuli and spoken stimuli with a beat than for spoken stimuli and that music training interacts with the musical characteristics of the stimuli.

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