Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English: Focus on Intelligibility

ISBN-10: 1000340090
ISBN-13: 9781000340099
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Pages: 396
Language: English
Published: 2021-04-20
Publisher: CRC Press
Author: Ettien Koffi

Description

Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher’s theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher’s and Bekesy’s approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds –10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian "the Slavic Group," 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions: Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility? The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, a over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).

Get the book

Similar books

Verbs: Aspect and Causal Structure
By William Croft
A fourth type of phasal analysis is offered by Timberlake (1985). Timberlake assumes an interval temporal semantics like Woisetschlaeger, and focuses on ...
Linguistic Semantics
By William Frawley
In some languages, this elemental opposition surfaces directly, asin the Austronesian (Chamorro: Chung and Timberlake 1985; Bikol: Givón 1984) and certain ...
Communication Law
By Dominic G Caristi, William R Davie, Michael Cavanaugh
Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were performing during the halftime show when a “wardrobe malfunction” exposed for a fraction of a second the singer's ...
Communication Law: Practical Applications in the Digital Age
By William R Davie, Dom Caristi
Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were performing during the halftime show when a “wardrobe malfunction” exposed for a fraction of a second the singer's ...
The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World
By Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins, William Pagliuca
... 70, 85,171,231 Thomson, Greg, xix Thomson, R. W, 231, 233 Timberlake, Alan, ... J. M., 225, 235 van Putte, E., 286, 294 Vermant, S., 61,62 Vincent, N., ...
The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English
By Clive Upton, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.
... 'timbol, –Z timber BR 'timble(r), -oz, -(e)rin, -od AM 'timblor, -orz, -(e)rin, ... -s Timberlake BR 'timboleik AM 'timbor,eik timberland BR 'timbaland, ...
Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication
By William B. Gudykunst
... 237 St. George , R. , 38 Stilling , E. , 251 Stonequist , E. , 247 Stopka ... R. , 149 Tidwell , R. , 227 , 230 Timberlake , M. F. , 266 Ting - Toomey ...
The Story Within: New Insights and Inspiration for Writers
By Laura Oliver, M.F.A.
... line on Deck D. A baby squeals in the background cacophony ofthe airport. ... spirit in terms of matter, matter in terms ofspirit,” Robert Frost said.
Maintaining Long-Distance and Cross-Residential Relationships
By Laura Stafford
... 30, 31, 32, 34 Durand, D., 49 Dwyer, J. W., 78 E Egan, J., 93 Eisenberg, ... 102 Floyd, K., 85, 89, 91 Forsyth, C. J., 41, 42, 48, 5.1 Frost-Knappman, ...
Emergent Literacy: Lessons for Success
By Sonia Q. Cabell, Laura M. Justice, Joan Kaderavek
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 4, 331–342. Freedman, D. (2007). Scribble. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers. Frost, J. (2001).