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Abstract
Pitch range is believed to code important information that is indispensable for correct decoding of spoken messages. Previous research found differences in pitch variation across languages like English, French, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech and German. In addition, differences in pitch range of foreign-accented and native speech were found in various types of speech material. In the present study a sample of sixteen English and American men and women produced recordings of spoken texts consisting of eight paragraphs taken from Czech news broadcasts. Manually corrected F0 tracks provided a possibility to extract four measures of F0 distributional dispersion in order to map global intonational habits of Anglophone learners of Czech as a foreign language. The extracted values were compared with reference values from earlier studies. The results in all four measures indicate that foreign accented Czech is spoken with a pitch range that is narrower than that of English and often even narrower than that of native Czech. Considering results of similar, albeit smaller, studies done earlier, we would attribute our findings to implicit uncertainty in the use of the foreign language, rather than to overcompensation.
Highlights
Learners of foreign languages aspired at proficiency comparable with that of the native users of the language
The results showed that this plain swapping of F0 tracks had an impact on reaction times and that unaltered Czech English was the most difficult to process (Volín & Poesová, 2016)
These were provided by Volín, Poesová and Weingartová (2015) and pertain to the same type of spoken texts
Summary
Learners of foreign languages aspired at proficiency comparable with that of the native users of the language. Common sense would have it that the educated native speakers’ mastery was the appropriate model for a determined language learner. The overwhelming trend is to subscribe to the concept of comfortable intelligibility. This is a praiseworthy approach, we are far from understanding where exactly intelligibility starts and ends, and, above all, what makes it comfortable. Comfortable intelligibility is a reasonable concept in common classrooms of mass education, but will not provide any useful guidance in empirical research unless comfort on various levels of (un)consciousness can be measured
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