The rhythm of Aviation English by Native American English speakers

Abstract

Air traffic controllers (ATC) and pilots at international airports must speak Aviation English (AE). Native and non-native English speakers alike must learn and effectively communicate using this technical language based on standard English. This project calculates the rhythmic profile of Native Speaker Aviation English (NSAE), which serves as the target for learners of AE and against which potential communication failures can be evaluated. NSAE rhythmic profile can be contrasted with the first language (L1) prosody to evaluate learner AE production and model training methods for specific L1 AE learners. NSAE generally exhibits flat intonational contours, so we focus on rhythm metrics. Our previous study’s findings demonstrated that NSAE metrics pattern differently than standard American English, falling between “stress-timed” and “syllable-timed” languages. Rhythm metrics based on consonant and vowel duration are affected by AE’s lack of function words (i.e., fewer reducible vowels), standard phraseology (producing prosodic chunking), and rapid speech rate (reflecting compressibility differential between vowel and consonant segments). We are training an automatic speech aligner to segment ATC NSAE and calculating a baseline for American NSAE using qualitative metrics (Ramus 2000; Low et al., 2000; Dellwo 2006). We will present our findings on how NSAE patterns with similarly evaluated languages.