The phonology of second languages is different from the
phonology of
first languages in various ways. The differences are considered to come from general characteristics of
second languages, such as slower
speech rate, lower proficiency than native speakers, and from the interaction between non-native speakers' first and second languages.
Research on second-language phonology has been done not only on
segments, but also on prosody. Second-language
prosody, like second-language segments, has been studied in terms of both its global characteristics and the interactions between first languages and second languages.
First language to second language
Global second-language prosody characteristics
Speech rate
L2 speech rate is typically slower than native speech. For example,
Mandarin Chinese speakers’ speech rate in an English
utterance is slower than native English speakers’ speech rate (Derwing and Munro, 1995), and speech rates in a
sentence by highly experienced
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional It ...
and
Korean nonnative speakers of English are slower than that of native English speakers' (Guion et al., 2000). In this study, the main factor of the slower speech rate for the Italian and Korean accented English was the durations of the
vowels and
sonorant consonants (Guion et al., 2000). Another source of the slower speech rate in L2 speech is that L2 speakers tend to not reduce
function words, such as "the" or "and," as much as native speakers (Aoyama and Guion, 2007). The generally slower speech rate in L2 speech is correlated with the degree of perceived
foreign accent by native listeners (Derwing and Munro, 1997).
Interaction between first- and second-language prosody
L2 speech is influenced by the speaker's
L1 background. Such influences have been explored in relation to many
prosodic features, such as
pitch perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
and pitch excursion (Beckman, 1986; Aoyama and Guion, 2007),
stress placement (Archibald, 1995, 1998a, 1998b; Flege and Bohn, 1989; Archibald, 1997),
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...
structure (Broselow and Park, 1995; Broslow, 1988; Eckman, 1991), and
tone (Sereno and Wang, 2007; Guion and Pederson, 2007).
Pitch perception and pitch excursions
When perceiving accented syllables in
English,
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
nonnative speakers of English tend to rely only on F0, or
pitch of the accented syllables, while native speakers use F0,
duration, and
amplitude
The amplitude of a periodic variable is a measure of its change in a single period (such as time or spatial period). The amplitude of a non-periodic signal is its magnitude compared with a reference value. There are various definitions of ampl ...
(Beckman, 1986). This finding was confirmed in
production
Production may refer to:
Economics and business
* Production (economics)
* Production, the act of manufacturing goods
* Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services)
* Production as a stat ...
, by showing that the excursions of F0 of English
content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actio ...
s were larger for Japanese nonnative speakers of English than for native English speakers (Aoyama and Guion, 2007).
In both studies, the reason for this phenomenon was proposed to be related to the characteristics of the nonnative speakers’
L1, Japanese.
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
is a
mora-timed language
Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech.
Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postul ...
, and because of this, longer
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...
duration makes a
phonological difference in Japanese. Therefore, when expressing
stress in Japanese, Japanese speakers may rely more on F0 than
duration, which is a critical cue for a different
phonological distinction. This
L1 characteristic might interfere with Japanese speakers’
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
and
production
Production may refer to:
Economics and business
* Production (economics)
* Production, the act of manufacturing goods
* Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services)
* Production as a stat ...
of English, which is a
stress-timed language
Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech.
Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postul ...
and might be free of such durational restrictions.
Stress placement on words
Influence from
L1 to
L2 was also found in
stress placement on words.
Hungarian learners of English tend to place initial
stress on
English words that do not have initial
stress, because
Hungarian has fixed initial
stress and this is transferred to Hungarian speakers'
L2 English
prosody (Archibald, 1995; 1998a; 1998b).
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
speakers of English were found not to stress target stressed syllables in English, and this might be due to the lack of stress in Spanish
cognates
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical ef ...
and the
lexical similarity between Spanish and English words (Flege and Bohn, 1989). In addition, it is suggested that speakers of
tone languages (e.g.,
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of v ...
) and
pitch-accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
languages (e.g.,
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
), both of which use
pitch as a
phonologically
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
meaningful item, do not compute
stress placement in English, but rather store the stress information lexically (Archibald, 1997).
Syllable structure
L2 speakers can also perceive some innate characteristics of the
L2, which lead to different repair strategies for different
phonological patterns.
Korean L2 speakers of English add an extra final vowel to some English words but not to all (Broslow and Park, 1995), as in (1).
(1) Korean pronunciations of English words
The problem is that modern
Korean does not have a phonological
vowel length difference, and Korean speakers show their own repair mechanism for
English minimal pairs
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate th ...
that have
tense/lax difference, by adding an extra final vowel to English words with tense vowels. This might be because Korean learners of English attempt to preserve the
mora count of the original English word, by adding an extra final vowel to words that have two moras (Broslow and Park, 1995). The
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...
structure of such a word might look like in (2)
(2) Syllable structure of English “beat” by Korean nonnative speakers of English (adapted from Broslow and Park, 1995).
Tone: second-language perception, production, and learning
L2 listeners show different patterns of
tone perception in
tone languages, such as
Mandarin Chinese. In Guion and Pederson (2007),
native listeners of Mandarin judged the similarity of synthesized
Mandarin tones on the basis of both
F0 and F0 slope, while English and Japanese listeners used only F0, not
F0 slope. However, it was also observed that late learners of Mandarin showed similar patterns of tone perception as native listeners of Mandarin, focusing on both F0 and F0 slope of the tones. This suggests that
L2 learners can learn to attend to the cues that
L1 speakers use for the tone distinction.
The possibility of learning new
L2 prosodic distinction was further explored in a training study on
Mandarin tones (Sereno and Wang, 2007). English
L2 listeners’ perception and production of Mandarin tones improved after
perceptual training, and this was observed both
behaviorally and
cortically:
L2 listeners’ accuracy of tone perception and production improved, and increased activity of language areas in the
left hemisphere (
superior temporal gyrus
The superior temporal gyrus (STG) is one of three (sometimes two) gyri in the temporal lobe of the human brain, which is located laterally to the head, situated somewhat above the external ear.
The superior temporal gyrus is bounded by:
* the l ...
) and
neighboring effects on relevant
neural
In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes ...
areas were observed.
Intonation
*Dutch English
*Willems (1982): size and direction of pitch movements
*Korean and Mandarin Englishes
*McGory (1997): nonnatives put pitch accents both on prominent and less prominent words, f0 patterns of statements and questions indistinct, different L1 backgrounds showed different error patterns
Second language to first language
*Phonetic Realization of Phonological Intonation
*Dutch Greek
*Ineke Mennen (2004): Both L1 and L2 influence each other in terms of phonetic realization of phonological intonation.
Teaching second language pronunciation
Before the popularity of communicative teaching methods in the late 70s, pronunciation teaching through audio-lingual method (ALM) had a central place in language education. This emphasis shifted in the late 70's when the prevalent obsession with aural-oral drills, native-like accuracy, consonant pair repetition and the centrality of pronunciation was replaced by a concern for meaningful communication. For nearly a decade, it was assumed that listening to language was enough to develop pronunciation. This concern again saw a shift in the late 80's when pronunciation again found a place in desired language teaching outcomes due to an increased need to develop L2 learners' pronunciation of the second language. In the 80's and 90's seminal pedagogical texts written by Judy Gilbert and Celce-Murcia paved the path for a more interactive and meaningful way of teaching pronunciation in the 21st century. These approaches are a combination of audio-lingual and communicative methods, have still retained the minimum pair drill format, but there is increased emphasis on interaction and also suprasegmental features such as stress, intonation and rhythm.
References
Notes
Bibliography
* Aoyama, K. & Guion, S. G. (2007). Prosody in second language acquisition: Acoustic Analyses of duration and F0 range. In * * *
Bohn, O.-S. & Munro, M. J. (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (pp. 282–297). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
* Archibald, J. (1995). The acquisition of stress. In J. Archibald (Ed.), Phonological acquisition and phonological theory (pp. 81–109). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
* Archibald, J. (1997). The acquisition of English stress by speakers of tone languages: Lexical storage versus computation. Linguistics, 35, 167–181.
* Archibald, J. (1998a). Metrical parameters and lexical dependency: Acquiring L2 stress. In S. Flynn & G. Martohardjono (eds.), The generative study of second language acquisition (Vol. 14, pp. 279–301). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
* Archibald, L. (1998b) Second language phonology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
* Beckman, M. E. (1986). Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris.
* Best, C. T. (1995). A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 171–204). Timonium, MD: York Press.
* Broselow, E., & Park, H.-B. (1995). Mora conservation in second language prosody. In J. Archibald (Ed.), Phonological acquisition and phonological theory (pp. 81–109). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.*
* Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (1997). Accent, intelligibility, and comprehensibility: Evidence from four L1s. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 1-16.
* Eckman, F. (1991). The structural conformity hypothesis and the acquisition of consonant clusters in the interlanguage of ESL learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 23–41.
* Flege, J. E. (1991). Age of learning affects the authenticity of voice-onset time (VOT) in stop consonants produced in a second language. Journal of the Acoustical society of America, 89, 395–411.
* Flege, J. E., & Bohn, O.-S. (1989). An instrumental study of vowel reduction and stress placement in Spanish-accented English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 11, 35–62.
* Guion, S. G. & Pederson, E. (2007). Investigating the role of attention in phonetic learning. In Bohn, O.-S. & Munro, M. J. (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (pp. 57–78). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
* Guion, S. G., Flege, J. E., Liu, S. H., & Yeni-Komshian, G. H. (2000). Age of learning effects on the duration of sentences produced in a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 205–228.
* Kuhl, P. K. (1991). Human adults and human infants show a “perceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not. perception & Psychophysics, 50, 93-107.
* Magen, I. (1998). The perception of foreign-accented speech. Journal of Phonetics, 26, 381–400.
* McGory, J. T. (1997). Acquisition of intonational prominence in English by Seoul Korean and Mandarin Chinese speakers. Unpublished Ph.D., Ohio State University.
* Mennen, I. (2004). Bi-directional interference in the intonation of Dutch speakers of Greek. Journal of Phonetics, 32, 543–563.
* Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1995). Processing time, accent, and comprehensibility in the perception of native and foreign-accented speech. Language and Speech, 38, 289–306.
* Sereno, J. A. & Wang, Y. (2007). Behavioral and cortical effects of learning a second language: The acquisition of tone. In Bohn, O.-S. & Munro, M. J. (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (pp. 241–258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
{{SLA topics
Phonology
Second-language acquisition