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Book Training Spanish Speakers in the Perception and Production of English Vowels

Download or read book Training Spanish Speakers in the Perception and Production of English Vowels written by Grisel María García Pérez and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Second Language Perception of Spanish Monophthongal Vowels

Download or read book Second Language Perception of Spanish Monophthongal Vowels written by Daniel Bates and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation research examines the acquisition of second language vowels. For second language learners, learning a new languages' sound inventory, particularly its vowels, presents a challenge perceptually and in terms of production. Incorrectly perceiving and producing sounds in a second language results in a foreign accent in many adult learners (Flege, 1995), as mental representations of second language sounds have not been properly established in the mind of the learner (Best, 1991). Vowel sounds are particularly relevant in discussion of foreign-accented speech.Second language vowel perception has received relatively little attention in recent literature, especially for English speakers learning Spanish as a second language. Often, empirical findings are inconsistent with each other. For example, Gordon (2011) found that, perceptually, learners struggle with Spanish vowels /i/ and /e/, interpreting them as English vowels /ɪ/ and /ɛ/, respectively. Garcia de las Bayonas (2004; 2008) indicates that learners struggle most perceiving /u/ and /e/. Most research on the acquisition of these vowels focuses on learner production rather than perception, with equally inconsistent findings (see, for example, Cobb and Simonet, 2015; Menke and Face, 2010). Additionally, the role of syllable stress is often not incorporated into these studies despite the importance of syllable stress in saliency and understanding. These gaps in the literature present an exciting opportunity to understand these acquisitional processes, beginning with the under-studied role of perception. Building on the methodology of Garcia de las Bayonas (2004) and other perceptual studies, this remotely conducted study explores the perception of Spanish vowels by English-speaking learners with special attention paid to the role of syllable stress. Efforts are made to better understand (1) at what point these learners establish the mental representations necessary for Spanish vowel sounds, (2) which English vowels interfere with this learning process, and (3) the role of syllable stress in vowel perception. Participants included 243 Spanish learners in seven different levels of Spanish learning, indicated by class enrollment. The methodology include a discrimination task and an identification task. In the discrimination task, participants hea two disyllabic Spanish words and are asked to decide if the words were different or identical. In the identification task, participants are given a disyllabic Spanish word with one vowel highlighted. Participants are provided with five vowel sounds and select which of the sound options belonged with the highlighted vowel. The options consist of both Spanish and English vowel sound options. Confidence levels (on a scale of 1-7) are reported for all responses. Results from the first task indicate that vowels in stressed syllables are easier to perceive for all groups. For less-experienced learners, discriminating between the Spanish vowels /o/ and /u/ prove to be most difficult, as these vowels differ acoustically much more than their English vowel equivalents. The results of this task indicate that students in their fourth semester of learning (and those more advanced) performed statistically similar to native speaker controls. The identification task reveals that learners struggle to correctly identify the Spanish vowels /e/ and /a/. When asked to identify the vowel /e/, many learners select the English vowels /ɛ/, and especially /ɪ/. For items targeting /a/, many participants select /æ/, /ɑ/ and the reduced vowel schwa [ə]. These results indicate that these English vowels cause the most interference for learners learning Spanish, resulting in Multiple-category Assimilation (Best, 1991; Escudero and Boersma, 2002). Results from this task also indicate that learners in their 4th semester, and those who are more advanced, tend to make selections statistically similar to native Spanish speakers. The results of this study indicate that by the end of the second year of classroom study, many second language Spanish learners have established mental representations for the vowels of Spanish. Language dominance scores are also collected from each participant (using the Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong, Gertken, and Amengual, 2012)), which were found to have a strong linear correlation with performance in both tasks, both in terms of accuracy and reported confidence levels. This supports the notion that the more a person uses a language, the better established their phonological inventory will be. Measures of language proficiency and language attitudes are also found to be correlated with participants' accuracy and confidence levels. These findings support theoretical claims made by the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1991), and shows the process by which mental representations are established for second language phones. Future studies should explore these results in conjunction with vowel production while not forgetting the effect of syllable stress.

Book The Acquisition of Vowels in Spanish and English as a Second Language

Download or read book The Acquisition of Vowels in Spanish and English as a Second Language written by Mariche García de las Bayonas and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Perception of American English Vowels by Spanish English Bilingual Listeners

Download or read book Perception of American English Vowels by Spanish English Bilingual Listeners written by Paula Garcia and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Event Related Potentials (ERPs - MMN and P300) are neurophysiological indices that can reflect native and non-native mental phonological representations. Findings from the pilot study that utilized natural and neutralized duration speech sounds revealed behavioral and neurophysiological differences between Spanish-English bilingual listeners and native English speakers responses to natural AE vowel contrasts. This raised a question of whether adult Spanish-English bilinguals relied on speech cues in a similar fashion to native English speakers when perceiving these AE vowel contrasts. It is understood that language-specific use of speech cues (e.g. spectral and durational) helps to distinguish between perceptually similar speech sounds. Therefore, it was assumed that removal of duration distinctions between the target vowels would reveal any underlying differences in the processing mechanism and how much L1-Spanish listeners rely on durational cues to perceive subtle differences between vowel pairs.

Book Factors Affecting English Speakers Perception of L2 Spanish Vowels

Download or read book Factors Affecting English Speakers Perception of L2 Spanish Vowels written by Leslie S. Gordon and published by ProQuest. This book was released on 2008 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the existing studies of the perceptual abilities of the English speaking learner of Spanish some important variables have been left unexplored. The first of these regards the difference in size of the vowel inventories of these two languages and the effect of the larger English inventory upon listeners' perception of the L2 Spanish inventory. Specifically, the English vowel inventory includes some vowel categories whose existence has been shown to interfere with the English speaker's perception of Spanish vowels (Bradlow 1995, 1996). Additionally, the duration and diphthongized quality of English tense vowels may exert an influence upon the perception of 'similar' Spanish vowels. Lastly, studies on the effects of training on vowel perception have shown mixed results, (Francis, et al., 2000; Jamieson & Morosan, 1989; Lisker, 1970; Logan & Pruitt, 1995; Pisoni et al., 1982; Strange & Dittman, 1984; Tees & Werker, 1984; Werker & Tees, 1984). The current study addresses the effects of vowel inventory size, acoustic differences and perceptual training measures upon the vowel perception of native English speakers learning L2 Spanish.

Book Training Spanish Speakers to Perceive and Pronounce English Vowels

Download or read book Training Spanish Speakers to Perceive and Pronounce English Vowels written by Grisel Maria Garcia-Perez and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the effects of training native speakers of Spanish in the perception and production of English vowels in a regular classroom setting.

Book Perception and Production of Canadian English Vowels by L1 Spanish Speakers

Download or read book Perception and Production of Canadian English Vowels by L1 Spanish Speakers written by Santiago Barreda and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Initial State for California English Learners of Spanish and Portuguese Vowels

Download or read book The Initial State for California English Learners of Spanish and Portuguese Vowels written by Polina Vasiliev and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second language (L2) learners often struggle with achieving native-like production and perception of L2 sounds. While there is ample research on the non-native perception of English vowels by native speakers of languages with smaller vowel inventories, scant research exists up-to-date on the opposite scenario. The aim of the present study is to investigate the initial state for Californian English (CE) listeners' perception of two different smaller vowel inventories, namely Spanish and Portuguese vowels, before any perceptual learning has taken place. The objective is to determine how CE listeners' native vowel inventory of (at least) ten phonemes affects their non-native perception of the five Spanish and seven Portuguese vowel phonemes. Monolingual speakers of English from Southern California (N = 18) completed a perceptual assimilation task, in which they labeled naturally produced tokens of Spanish and Portuguese vowels in terms of ten native English categories, as well as a categorial discrimination task with four Spanish and six Portuguese vowel contrasts. In the perceptual assimilation task, CE listeners mapped almost every Spanish and Portuguese vowel contrast to more than two native categories, resulting in many instances of Multiple Category Assimilation (MCA, Escudero and Boersma, 2002). Furthermore, some phonologically common vowels between Spanish and Portuguese, namely /e/, /o/, and /a/, were mapped differently to English categories, suggesting that cross-linguistic differences in the acoustic distributions of these sounds result in differences in their categorization by non-native listeners. In the discrimination task, CE listeners were highly accurate at distinguishing all Spanish vowel contrasts but were less accurate on three Portuguese vowel contrasts, /i-e/, /o-u/, and /a-O/. Crucially, MCA was found to be responsible for listeners' lower discrimination accuracy only when it contributed to two vowels being perceptually assimilated to an overlapping set of native categories, i.e., when two different vowels had a high perceptual assimilation overlap score. The results are examined vis-à-vis two main models of second language speech perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM, Best, 1995) and the Second Language Linguistic Perception Model (L2LP, Escudero, 2005). Implications for L2 acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese vowels by English-speaking learners are discussed.

Book Perception and Production of English Vowels by Native Speakers of Arabic microform

Download or read book Perception and Production of English Vowels by Native Speakers of Arabic microform written by Murray James Munro and published by National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. This book was released on 1992 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book L One and L Two Production and Perception of English and Spanish Vowels

Download or read book L One and L Two Production and Perception of English and Spanish Vowels written by Geoffrey Steward Morrison and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Sound perception and production in a foreign language

Download or read book Sound perception and production in a foreign language written by Nimz, Katharina and published by Universitätsverlag Potsdam. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present study addresses the question of how German vowels are perceived and produced by Polish learners of German as a Foreign Language. It comprises three main experiments: a discrimination experiment, a production experiment, and an identification experiment. With the exception of the discrimination task, the experiments further investigated the influence of orthographic marking on the perception and production of German vowel length. It was assumed that explicit markings such as the Dehnungs-h ("lengthening h") could help Polish GFL learners in perceiving and producing German words more correctly. The discrimination experiment with manipulated nonce words showed that Polish GFL learners detect pure length differences in German vowels less accurately than German native speakers, while this was not the case for pure quality differences. The results of the identification experiment contrast with the results of the discrimination task in that Polish GFL learners were better at judging incorrect vowel length than incorrect vowel quality in manipulated real words. However, orthographic marking did not turn out to be the driving factor and it is suggested that metalinguistic awareness can explain the asymmetry between the two perception experiments. The production experiment supported the results of the identification task in that lengthening h did not help Polish learners in producing German vowel length more correctly. Yet, as far as vowel quality productions are concerned, it is argued that orthography does influence L2 sound productions because Polish learners seem to be negatively influenced by their native grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. It is concluded that it is important to differentiate between the influence of the L1 and L2 orthographic system. On the one hand, the investigation of the influence of orthographic vowel length markers in German suggests that Polish GFL learners do not make use of length information provided by the L2 orthographic system. On the other hand, the vowel quality data suggest that the L1 orthographic system plays a crucial role in the acquisition of a foreign language. It is therefore proposed that orthography influences the acquisition of foreign sounds, but not in the way it was originally assumed.