Acoustic analysis on before- and after-training English speeches by a male Japanese high-school student

Abstract

Two sets of a 7-minute English speech by a 15-year-old Japanese male speaker, one made before two-month intensive training (approx. 2 hours per day, 3 to 4 days per week) and the other made after the training, were recorded and acoustically analyzed. The speech manuscript was constructed for a national English speech competition for students of the National Institutes of Technology in Japan, with ages ranging from 15 to 22 years. The intelligibility ratings of the two speeches evaluated by native speakers of American English (AE) indicated that the post-training speech was much more intelligible than the pre-training speech. Preliminary acoustic analysis focusing on the most frequently occurring words “traffic accidents” indicated that the temporal alignments of the consonant-vowel sequences of the words, along with the intensity and the duration of the stressed and unstressed vowels, were evidently different between the two speeches, with the tokens in the post-training speech closer to those in the spee...