Matching Acoustical Properties and Native Perceptual Assessments of L2 Speech
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In this paper, the authors analyzed the acoustical properties of Dutch vowels produced by adult Spanish learners and investigated how these vowels are perceived by non-expert native Dutch listeners.Abstract:
Abstract This article analyses the acoustical properties of Dutch vowels produced by adult Spanish learners and investigates how these vowels are perceived by non-expert native Dutch listeners. Statistical vowel classifications obtained from the acoustical properties of the learner vowel realizations were compared to vowel classifications provided by native Dutch listeners. Both types of classifications were affected by the specific set of vowels included as stimuli, an effect caused by the large variability in Spanish learners’ vowel realizations. While there were matches between the two types of classifications, shifts were noted within and between production and perception, depending on the vowel and vowel features. We considered the variability between Spanish learners further by investigating individual patterns in the production and perception data, and linking these to the learners’ proficiency level and multilingual background. We conclude that integrating production and perception data provides valuable insights into the role of different features in adult L2 learning, and how their properties actively interact in the way L2 speech is perceived. A second conclusion is that adaptive mechanisms, signalled by boundary shifts and useful in coping with variability of non-native vowel stimuli, play a role in both statistical vowel classifications (production) and human vowel recognition (perception).read more
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Dissertation
Patterns of learner variation in Spanish accented Dutch
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied the pronunciation problems of adult Spanish learners of Dutch, and their possible sources, as well as to find out how well native Dutch listeners perceive Spanish-accented Dutch pronunciation, in terms of intelligibility.
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Journal ArticleDOI
Classification of Russian Vowels Spoken by Different Speakers
TL;DR: In this article, the problem of speaker normalization is investigated for classifying the Russian vowels, and a new statistical method of normalisation is suggested. And the results of the comparison show that the normalization suggested in this letter has the largest index, not only on the average but also for each individual vowel pair.
Journal ArticleDOI
The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.
Tessa Bent,Ann R. Bradlow +1 more
TL;DR: Findings shed light on the nature of the talker-listener interaction during speech communication and show speech from a relatively high proficiency non-native talker from the same native language background was as intelligible asspeech from a native talker, giving rise to the "matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit".
Journal ArticleDOI
Interaction between the native and second language phonetic subsystems
TL;DR: The study tested the hypothesis that the vowels a bilingual produces in a second language (L2) may differ from vowels produced by monolingual native speakers of the L2 as the result of either of two mechanisms: phonetic category assimilation or phonetic categories dissimilation.
Journal ArticleDOI
A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research.
TL;DR: The results show that normalization procedures that use information across multiple vowels to normalize a single vowel token performed better than those that include only information contained in the vowel token itself ("vowel-intrinsic" information).