Perception of English Voicing by Native and Nonnative Adults

1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. S. Bond ◽  
Joann Fokes
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
American English ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Perceptual System ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American English Speakers

Recordings of naturally produced stop-vowel English words with a wide range of voice onset time values were used to investigate nonnative perception of voicing categories. L2 learners of English from nine language groups and native American English speakers served as subjects. The responses of the language learners suggested that they were using a hybrid perceptual system, one in which the English voicing categories were not yet fully established.

scholarly journals Beyond saying thanks

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Montserrat Mir ◽  
Josep M. Cots
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Verbal Reports ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Completion Test ◽  
Scale Down ◽  
Peninsular Spanish ◽  
American English Speakers

Abstract This study explores how American English and Peninsular Spanish speakers respond to a compliment. Participants completed an online discourse completion test with nine different complimenting scenarios. A total of 14 different strategies for responding to a compliment were found in the data. Based on verbal reports on language use, it was found that Peninsular Spanish speakers do not compliment as often as American English speakers do. The data analysis also revealed that both language groups clearly prefer to accept a compliment, but whereas American English speakers regard a simple ‘thank you’ as an appropriate compliment response, Peninsular Spanish speakers prefer to agree with the complimented assertion by making a semantically fitted comment. Other differences include the importance of returning a compliment in American English and the need to scale down the illocutionary force of the compliment among Peninsular Spanish speakers.

scholarly journals HOW TO TEACH AMERICAN ACCENT// International Journal of Educational and Scientific Research 4(12), 2021/ Chief Editor K. Kumpulainen /OEAPS OU - Tallinn, Estonia (Open European Academy of Public Sciences). Vienna, Austria 30.04.2021: OEAPS OU., 2021. P. 9-12.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rano Mukhtarovna Parkhatova ◽  
Zhanna Borisovna Erzhanova
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chief Editor ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
European Academy ◽  
The North ◽  
American English Speakers

It is no secret that people intuitively understand the level of English proficiency by the accent, and this happens in the first seconds of a conversation. Each dialect of English has its own unique pronunciation – from British to Australian. And in countries where the dialect is spoken, having an appropriate accent will help you sound more natural. Do you want to feel more confident speaking English without a foreign accent in the United States? One way to do this is to speak with an American accent, although this is by no means easy. Just as having a British accent will help you fit in better in England, an American accent will help you communicate fluently with native American English speakers. The North American English accent is one of the most popular among students of English as a foreign language, and there are a huge number of resources that will help you master it. Here are several steps to help you improve your American accent and sound like native speakers.

scholarly journals The Perception and Production of Word-Initial Korean Stops by Native Speakers of Japanese

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-508
Author(s):  
Jeffrey J Holliday
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Korean Stops

Previous studies have shown that non-native speakers of Korean not only have difficulty producing the word-initial three-way stop contrast, but also exhibit a wide range of production patterns. Because these studies have only investigated native (L1) speakers of English and Mandarin and given the overall paucity of research on non-native Korean, it is not yet clear how dependent these findings are on the particular native language under investigation. The current paper reinforces our empirical grounding via extension to L1 speakers of Japanese. It is shown that although naïve Japanese listeners consistently perceive Korean fortis stops as voiced, and Korean lenis and aspirated stops as voiceless, novice second language learners do not produce any significant difference among the three stop categories, despite producing clear differences between their native Japanese stop categories. Unlike in previous studies of L1 speakers of English and Mandarin, there was very little inter-speaker variation, and all speakers produced all Korean stops with long lag voice onset time.

scholarly journals What constrains distributional learning in adults?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave F Kleinschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
American English ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Human Infant ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Prior Beliefs ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Distributional Learning ◽  
The Many

One of the many remarkable features of human language is it's flexibility: during acquisition, any normally-developing human infant can acquire any human language, and during adulthood, language users quickly and flexibly adapt to a wide range of talker variation. Both language acquisition in infants and adaptation in adults have been hypothesized to be forms of distributional learning, where flexibility is driven by sensitivity to statistical properties of sensory stimuli and the corresponding underlying linguistic structures. Despite the similarities between these forms of linguistic flexibility, there are obvious differences as well, chief among them being that adults have a much harder time acquiring the same unfamiliar languages that they would have picked up naturally during infancy. This suggests that there are strong constraints on distributional learning during adulthood. This paper provides further, direct evidence for these constraints, by showing that American English listeners struggle to learn voice-onset time (VOT) distributions that are atypical of American English. Moreover, computational modeling shows that the pattern of distributional learning (or lack thereof) across different VOT distributions is consistent with Bayesian belief-updating, starting from prior beliefs that are very similar to the VOT distributions produced by a typical talker of American English. Together, this suggests that distributional learning in adults is constrained by prior experience with other talkers, and that distributional learning may be a computational principle of human language that operates throughout the lifespan.

scholarly journals VOICE ONSET TIME IN MULTILINGUAL SPEAKERS: ITALIAN HERITAGE SPEAKERS IN GERMANY WITH L3 ENGLISH

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Miriam Geiss ◽  
Sonja Gumbsheimer ◽  
Anika Lloyd-Smith ◽  
Svenja Schmid ◽  
Tanja Kupisch
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Bilingual Advantage ◽  
L3 Acquisition ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence

Abstract This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and English as L3. The study aims to identify the extent to which the HSs produce distinct values across all three languages, or whether crosslinguistic influence (CLI) occurs. To this end, we compare the HSs’ voice onset time (VOT) values with those of L2 English speakers from Italy and Germany. The language triad exhibits overlapping and distinct VOT realizations, making VOT a potentially vulnerable category. Results indicate CLI from German into Italian, although a systemic difference is maintained. When speaking English, the HSs show an advantage over the Italian L2 control group, with less prevoicing and longer fortis stops, indicating a specific bilingual advantage.

scholarly journals Similar frequency of the McGurk effect in large samples of native Mandarin Chinese and American English speakers

2015 ◽  
Vol 233 (9) ◽  
pp. 2581-2586 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Magnotti ◽  
Debshila Basu Mallick ◽  
Guo Feng ◽  
Bin Zhou ◽  
Wen Zhou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
American English ◽  
Mcgurk Effect ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Similar Frequency ◽  
Large Samples ◽  
American English Speakers

scholarly journals Forum: Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Monique T. Mills
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Interprofessional Education ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
American English ◽  
Community Based Participatory Research ◽  
African American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Education Practice ◽  
Literacy Outcomes ◽  
American English Speakers

Purpose African American English (AAE) speakers often face mismatches between home language and school language, coupled with negative attitudes toward AAE in the classroom. This forum, Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice, will help researchers, parents, and school-based practitioners communicate in ways that are synergistic, collaborative, and transparent to improve educational outcomes of AAE speakers. Method The forum includes a tutorial offering readers instructions on how to engage in community-based participatory research (Holt, 2021). Through two clinical focus articles, readers will recognize how AAE develops during the preschool years and is expressed across various linguistic contexts and elicitation tasks (Newkirk-Turner & Green, 2021) and identify markers of developmental language disorder within AAE from language samples analyzed in Computerized Language Analysis (Overton et al., 2021). Seven empirical articles employ such designs as quantitative (Byrd & Brown, 2021; Diehm & Hendricks, 2021; Hendricks & Jimenez, 2021; Maher et al., 2021; Mahurin-Smith et al., 2021), qualitative (Hamilton & DeThorne, 2021), and mixed methods (Mills et al., 2021). These articles will help readers identify ways in which AAE affects how teachers view its speakers' language skills and communicative practices and relates to its speakers' literacy outcomes. Conclusion The goal of the forum is to make a lasting contribution to the discipline with a concentrated focus on how to assess and address communicative variation in the U.S. classroom.

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