“Hama”? Reduced pronunciations in non-native natural speech obstruct high-school students’ comprehension at lower processing levels

Karin Wanrooij,Maartje E.J Raijmakers

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101082

Abstract

Native speakers ‘reduce’ their pronunciations, i.e., they shorten and merge words. For instance, German native speakers may say “hama” for “haben wir” (‘have-we’). We examined to what extent such reductions are problematic for adolescent learners of a second language, after four years of high-school training; and whether the problems can be related to inadequate bottom-up and top-down processing. For this, 39 Dutch and 38 German adolescents heard either reduced or unreduced German full phrases and part-phrases (phrase-intelligibility task) and words (lexical decision task). The results show that (1) Learners perceive non-native reduced speech less accurately than unreduced speech and also judge it as less intelligible; (2) This reduced-form disadvantage occurs separately from factors such as speech rate, orthography and voice; (3) The disadvantage for non-native listeners is substantial and larger than that in native listeners. Therefore, it probably reflects a lack of experience with reduced (i.e., real-life) speech; and (4) Non-native reductions induce at least inadequate bottom-up processing in learners, and may make top-down processing less accessible. We interpret the findings as supporting the idea that experience with variants (here: reduced variants) is necessary to strengthen linguistic (word) representations.

Highlights

Understanding non-native natural speech is notoriously difficult
1 Present address: Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands. These examples, words in reduced speech do not appear in the forms that are familiar from textbooks for learners of a non-native language ( ‘L2 learners’; L2 is the common abbreviation for ‘second language’; we use it as a reference to any non-native language)
The effect of L2 reductions on processing The third main research question is: what mechanisms may underlie a reduced-form disadvantage in the L2 learners? can perceptual difficulties with reduced speech be related to obstructions in bottom-up and/or top-down processing (Table 1)? Below, we will first explain bottom-up and top-down processing and why we believe that L2 reductions can impair both, before describing how we address the question in this paper

Summary

Introduction

One possible but little discussed cause is native speakers’ tendency to ‘reduce’ their pronunciations, i.e., to delete and assimilate speech sounds within and across words Such reductions occur naturally, in all languages (e.g., German: Kohler, 1998; Dutch: Ernestus, 2000; English: Shockey, 2003, Johnson, 2004; Japanese: Maekawa & Kikuchi, 2005; review in Ernestus & Warner, 2011). Two examples in German, the target language in this article are hama [hamɐ] for the word combination haben wir [habən viɐ] ‘we have’ (literally: ‘have we’) and haspmmomentsait [haspmmomentsaɪt] for the sentence Hast du einen Moment Zeit [hasth du ʔaɪnən momenth tsaɪth] ‘Do you have a moment?’ (Kohler, 1998) As visible in these examples, words in reduced speech do not appear in the forms that are familiar from textbooks for learners of a non-native language ( ‘L2 learners’; L2 is the common abbreviation for ‘second language’; we use it as a reference to any non-native language).

Objectives

Results

Conclusion