Target Attainment in the Production of English Vowels by Polish Students: The Influence of Language Instruction in the Time of Covid-19, Imitation, and Musicality

This pilot experimental study pursues a number of goals. Firstly, it aims to assess the phonetic attainment of selected English vowels among twelve Polish students of English philology after one term of intensive online pronunciation training in pandemic conditions. Secondly, it looks at potential differences between production outcomes in two experimental contexts, that is, reading and imitation. Finally, it seeks to determine if there is any correlation between musicality and target attainment with a view to identifying a broader scope for potential future research questions. For this purpose, recorded samples of read and imitated English words containing vowels in a uniform context /h_d/ were assessed by six raters using a 5-point Likert scale. The results, including those of an online musicality test, were analysed and subjected to statistical testing. The majority of total scores exceed the assumed acceptability benchmark of 50%. The study yielded a number of unexpected results. Firstly, female participants performed significantly better than male ones in the reading experiment, but not in imitation. Secondly, a stronger correlation was found between the reading results and musicality than between imitation results and musicality.

An Acoustic Analysis of New Zealand English Vowels in Auckland

<p>This study presents an acoustic analysis looking at phonetic diversity in Auckland. New Zealand English is often characterized by a lack of regional variation; however, this claim has been made without considering Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Over the last 30 years there has been increased migration to New Zealand, specifically to Auckland. In 35% of Auckland’s suburbs, no ethnic group represents more than 50% of the population. In addition, many speakers were born overseas, and many more have grown up using different varieties of English as the spoken norm. In this study, 40 New Zealand English speakers from three suburbs in Auckland (Mt. Roskill n= 14, Papatoetoe, n=13, Titirangi, n=13) were recorded. For our young group (n=33) the participants were aged between 18 and 25 years, and each suburb was evenly split between male and female participants. Speakers were either New Zealand born or arrived in the country under the age of seven. Our older group (n=7) were female speakers, all New Zealand born, and aged between 40 and 70 yrs. Vowels which had sentence stress were identified and extracted, and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. All formant tracks were hand checked. Over 8000 monophthong tokens and 4000 diphthongs were analysed in this study. Whilst no differences were found between young speakers from different suburbs, there were age effects. Further, speech from the young Auckland speakers was noticeably different to findings from other studies on New Zealand English. Most notably monophthongs TRAP and DRESS were lower than expected. In addition the first targets of the diphthongs FACE and GOAT have risen, and PRICE has fronted, for younger speakers from all suburbs. The thesis concludes discussing the implications of the results.</p>

An Acoustic Analysis of New Zealand English Vowels in Auckland

<p>This study presents an acoustic analysis looking at phonetic diversity in Auckland. New Zealand English is often characterized by a lack of regional variation; however, this claim has been made without considering Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Over the last 30 years there has been increased migration to New Zealand, specifically to Auckland. In 35% of Auckland’s suburbs, no ethnic group represents more than 50% of the population. In addition, many speakers were born overseas, and many more have grown up using different varieties of English as the spoken norm. In this study, 40 New Zealand English speakers from three suburbs in Auckland (Mt. Roskill n= 14, Papatoetoe, n=13, Titirangi, n=13) were recorded. For our young group (n=33) the participants were aged between 18 and 25 years, and each suburb was evenly split between male and female participants. Speakers were either New Zealand born or arrived in the country under the age of seven. Our older group (n=7) were female speakers, all New Zealand born, and aged between 40 and 70 yrs. Vowels which had sentence stress were identified and extracted, and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. All formant tracks were hand checked. Over 8000 monophthong tokens and 4000 diphthongs were analysed in this study. Whilst no differences were found between young speakers from different suburbs, there were age effects. Further, speech from the young Auckland speakers was noticeably different to findings from other studies on New Zealand English. Most notably monophthongs TRAP and DRESS were lower than expected. In addition the first targets of the diphthongs FACE and GOAT have risen, and PRICE has fronted, for younger speakers from all suburbs. The thesis concludes discussing the implications of the results.</p>

Analyzing Elementary English Teachers’ Pronunciation Errors: Are We Intelligible?

Error analysis on students’ language performance has been massively discussed, yet few studies focused on teachers’ errors. Meanwhile, one of the main causes of students’ errors is the errors transferred from teachers. As the learners used to imitate their teachers sounds’ production, EFL teachers need to minimize errors when teaching at elementary school concerning the learners’ best period to acquire and learn a foreign language. The present study investigates EFL teachers’ pronunciation errors, specifically to find out the forms and causes of pronunciation errors in segmented vowels produced by the teachers. The research participants are 20 English teachers selected from various public and private elementary schools in Yogyakarta who were invited to pronounce 62 English words. The teachers were also required to fill out a questionnaire to find out external factors which are assumed can trigger the errors. The findings delineated that the teachers produced various forms of pronunciation errors in English vowels. The causes of errors lie in interlingual transfer, intralingual transfers, pronunciation differences between graphemes and sounds, hypercorrection, and words similarity. The external factors are also scrutinized, which include educational background and teachers’ lack of English practice. The study suggests that elementary EFL teachers in Indonesia should improve their pronunciation by frequently practicing and having intensive pronunciation training to teach better English to their learners.

The Vowels of Qassimi Dialect

This paper describes the vowels of the Qassimi dialect and explores the characteristic features of those vowels. To achieve this goal, the researcher has compiled a list of Qassimi words. Each word represents a major allophone of each vowel phoneme. These words were then repeated by Qassimi female speakers from Buraidah and recorded by the researcher. The data was subjected to acoustic analysis, and the results were compared to the acoustic results of English vowels. The analysis showed many similarities in the characteristics of both Qassimi and English vowels. However, it also showed some significant differences that distinguish the vowel system of Qassimi from the English vowel system as well as other Saudi dialects. This study sheds light on those differences, however it is left to future studies to investigate further and possibly compare other aspects of these dialects. This study contributes to the theoretical description of Saudi dialects, an area that needs many more contributions. In addition, this paper could be a part of the contrastive studies of Arabic and English, second language acquisition studies, or various other applied studies.

Functional MRI of Native and Non-native Speech Sound Production in Sequential German-English Bilinguals

Bilingualism and multilingualism are highly prevalent. Non-invasive brain imaging has been used to study the neural correlates of native and non-native speech and language production, mainly on the lexical and syntactic level. Here, we acquired continuous fast event-related FMRI during visually cued overt production of exclusively German and English vowels and syllables. We analyzed data from 13 university students, native speakers of German and sequential English bilinguals. The production of non-native English sounds was associated with increased activity of the left primary sensorimotor cortex, bilateral cerebellar hemispheres (lobule VI), left inferior frontal gyrus, and left anterior insula compared to native German sounds. The contrast German &gt; English sounds was not statistically significant. Our results emphasize that the production of non-native speech requires additional neural resources already on a basic phonological level in sequential bilinguals.

nurse Vowels in Scottish Standard English: Still Distinct or Merged?

While nearly all dialects on the British Isles have undergone the nurse merger, a process which merged the Middle English vowels /ɪ ɛ ʊ/ into the vowel /ə/ (which was later lengthened to /ɜ:/) in pre-rhotic positions, Scottish Standard English (SSE) is traditionally described as having retained a three-way distinction in these contexts. However, the gradual loss of this contrast has been observed in some varieties of Scottish English. This study investigates phonetic realizations within the nurse lexical set in SSE speech. 1227 tokens of the nurse vowel produced by ninety-two speakers were drawn from broadcast news, broadcast talks, legal presentations, non-broadcast talks, and unscripted speeches from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE Scotland). The first two formants (F1 and F2) were measured, transformed into Bark and normalized. A Bayesian linear mixed-effects regression model showed that in purely acoustic terms, the vowels in fir, fern, and fur are not merged and have a distinct F1 and F2. However, the pre-rhotic items are distinct from the reference categories kit, dress, and strut in being more centralized, and in some genres fir and fern are more strongly drawn towards the center of the vowel space (and each other) than fur is. While the social variables age and gender do not influence realizations of the nurse vowels in formal Scottish English at this general level, orthography and the realization of the following /r/ have a clear effect. Inspection of individual speakers further shows that several types of partial merger of these vowels exist; it is argued that this perspective is needed to understand variation within the SSE nurse lexical set.