Changes in the phonetics of German language learners over a semester

Abstract

We compare the acoustic phonetics of German language learners at the beginning and end of a college semester. Participants recorded three utterances of five example sentences in the first and last months of the semester. Results from the early recordings documented that language learners were intermediate between native speakers and naive speakers in at least two different acoustic contexts. The voice onset time (VOT) of the /f/ sound was short in native speakers (more /f/-like) and long in naive speakers (more /v/-like). Similarly, the vowel space traversed during the vowel sound of viel had a smaller area in native speakers than in naive speakers. We predict that, on average, language learners will show change in both their VOT and their vowel space, becoming more similar to native speakers, while naive speakers will not show any change. We will use paired t-tests to compare the early and late productions from each speaker. We will also expand the array of acoustic features that we will examine to include additional vowel and consonant sounds.