Native American English Speakers Research Articles

The Identification of Nasals in a Coda Position by Native Speakers of American English, Korean and Japanese

The Identification of Nasals in a Coda Position by Native Speakers of American English, Korean and Japanese

In-directness and Politeness in American English and Saudi Arabic Requests: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

This article examines the notions of (in)directness and politeness in the speech act of requests among Saudi Arabic native speakers as compared to American English native speakers. To elicit data on the requestive strategies that the two groups employed, a randomly chosen group of 30 Saudi and American undergraduate students were given a discourse completion test that consisted of twelve written context-enriched situations. The results revealed that conventional indirectness was the most prevailing strategy employed by the American sample. On the other hand, the Saudi sample varied their request strategies depending on the social variables of power and distance. The results also showed that the level of directness differed cross-culturally. American students used direct requests when addressing their friends on the condition that the request was not weighty; however, directness was the most preferred strategy among Saudi students in intimate situations where directness is interpreted as an expression of affiliation, closeness and group-connectedness rather than impoliteness.

The effect of training structure on perceptual learning of accented speech

Although previous research suggests that high variability training facilitates perceptual learning of systematic variation in speech, the extent to which the organization of training materials affects this learning remains relatively unexplored. The present study examined the role of training structure on the perceptual learning of speaker-independent properties of Spanish-accented speech. During training, native adult speakers of American English transcribed sentences spoken in English by four native Spanish-speaking adults. Training stimuli were presented to listeners either grouped by speaker, sentence, or randomized with respect to sentence and speaker. At test, listeners transcribed novel sentences produced by four unfamiliar Spanish-accented speakers. Transcription performance at test was found to vary as a function of the organization of training materials. Listeners transcribed test sentences more accurately when training sentences were randomized relative to when training sentences were grouped by speaker or when listeners received no training. Test performance when training sentences were grouped by sentence was intermediate. These findings suggest that variable training structure may direct listeners' attention to accent-general properties of speech, allowing for comparison across speakers' voices and linguistic content, and generalization of learning to unfamiliar accented speakers.

Native Catalan learners' perception and production of English vowels

This paper reports two experiments on nonnative vowel perception and production. In Experiment 1, three groups of Catalan learners varying in English proficiency were tested on their ability to discriminate seven Catalan–English (C–E) and four English–English (E–E) vowel contrasts. The vowel contrasts were natural speech tokens obtained from native Catalan and native American English speakers. On average, listeners distinguished the C–E /i–ɪ/ contrast relatively well, and they could partially distinguish /i–i/, /u–u/, and /a–ɑ/, but they had great difficulty with the /a–ʌ/, /a–æ/ and /ɛ–ɛ/ contrasts. As for the E–E pairs, the learners could discriminate the speech sounds in the /i–ɪ/ and /u–ʊ/ pairs, suggesting that learners may have established new phonetic categories for /ɪ/ and /ʊ/. In Experiment 2, a subgroup of the Catalan learners and a control group of native English speakers produced words containing one of the English vowels /i/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ɑ/, /ʌ/, /ʊ/, and /u/. Vowel accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements and by native listener judgments. The acoustic measurements revealed that, in spectral terms, learners produced vowels that were less peripheral than the native English (NE) versions, although there was a tendency for vowel expansion as a function of language proficiency. Vowel duration in the tense–lax vowel pairs also progressed toward more nativelike values in the productions of the more proficient learners. Finally, the NE listener judgments showed that most learners produced the vowels /ɪ/, /æ/, /ʊ/, and /u/ intelligibly but with significantly lower goodness ratings than did the NE speakers.

Semantička organizacija delova kuće prema srpskim i američkim ispitanicima

This paper compares the survey data obtained from native speakers of Serbian in Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia, and native speakers of (American) English in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The objective of the survey was twofold: (1) to provide insights into the internal structure of the house parts category, and (2) to determine what types of entities are generally classified into this category. The internal category structure was measured by the frequency and order with which the category members were named by the subjects in response to the category name. The study shows that the category is generally considered to include not only parts of the building itself, but also a large variety of household items it may contain, as well as surface/spatial entities found on a property area outside it. However, segmental parts of the building, seen either in terms of spaces or in terms of the structural elements that define those spaces, are regarded by both Serbian and American subjects as the best examples of the category.

Native English speakers learning German as a second language: Devoicing of final voiced stop targets

In contrast to German and other languages that devoice underlying word-final, voiced obstruent targets, English maintains a surface contrast between voiced and voiceless obstruents. The present study investigated the issue of what occurs when native speakers of American English, in an early stage of learning German as a second language (L2), produce word-final voiced and voiceless stop consonant targets in German versus English. The fact that the underlying voicing contrast in German is reflected orthographically (e.g., “To d” versus “to t”) might make it more difficult for native speakers of English to learn to devoice German word-final, voiced targets. The findings of this investigation indicate that many of the 12 native English learners of L2 German who were studied showed at least a tendency toward devoicing voiced targets in German relative to their productions of orthographically similar words in English (e.g., “toad” and “tote”). Considerable inter-subject variability was observed, but in general, their partial devoicing in German (relative to their English productions) occurred as a result of producing somewhat shorter vowels before voiced consonant targets and/or less contrast between voiceless versus voiced consonant closure duration. Subjects who produced more characteristically “voiced” consonants when speaking English (i.e., with longer preceding vowel duration, etc.) also tended to devoice German final stops to a lesser extent.

“That’s an Interesting Question, Indeed, not Only for You and I”: A (Non-Systematic) Fluctuation of Personal Pronoun Forms

This article deals with the fluctuation of subjective and objective pronominal forms in a specific type of constructions, namely in coordinated phrases. The analysis will demonstrate that the behaviour of the first person singular pronoun goes against all the general trends in the usage of pronominal forms. Subsequently, alternative approaches towards the idiosyncrasies of the first person singular pronoun will be presented. The analysis is based on the data taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and from surveys distributed among 209 native speakers of American English, from the age of 18 up to the age of 75. The data from both sources show that there is no systemic fluctuation in the environment of postverbal coordinated phrases as the variation between the two case forms does not affect the whole paradigm of personal pronouns, and is not induced proportionally after the analyzed heading prepositions.

Phonemic perception under noise condition by early and late learners of English

This study investigated long-term age effects of minimal input in an English as a foreign language (EFL) environment on the perception of English phonemes. Ten native speakers of American English, 10 university students who started studying English in Japan for a few hours a week between ages of three and eight (early learners), and 10 university students who began study in junior high school at the age of 12 or 13 (late learners) participated in a phonemic discrimination test. The selected target phonemes were tense vs. lax vowels ([i, ɪ], [u, U]) and word-initial approximants ([l,r]). Three monosyllabic words were selected for each phoneme (e.g., beat, bit). Each pair of words was tested as six different tri-word trials (e.g., AAB, ABA) with and without the presence of a white noise. The participants were asked to choose the odd out in each trial. Results showed that although the early and late learners did not significantly differ across the phonemes in the discrimination test given without any noise, the former outperformed the latter under noise condition (p < 0.05). The findings support Lin et al.'s (2004) hypothesis that early learners are likely to establish more robust phonemic categories than late learners.

Native English speakers learning German as a second language: Devoicing of word-final voiced stop targets

In contrast to German and other languages that devoice underlying word-final, voiced obstruent targets, English has a surface contrast between voiced and voiceless obstruents. The present study investigated the issue of what occurs when native speakers of American English, in an early stage of learning German as a second language, produce word-final voiced and voiceless stop targets in German versus English. The fact that the underlying voicing contrast in German is reflected orthographically (e.g., “Tod” versus “tot”) could make it difficult for native speakers of English to learn to devoice German word-final, voiced targets. The findings indicate that many of the 12 native English learners of German who were studied showed a tendency toward devoicing voiced targets in German relative to their productions of orthographically-similar words in English (e.g., “toad” and “tote”). In general, their partial devoicing in German (relative to their English productions) occurred due to a combination of producing somewhat shorter vowels before voiced consonant targets, reducing glottal pulsing during the closure of voiced consonant targets and/or shortening voiceless consonant closure durations. Subjects who produced more characteristically “voiced” consonants when speaking English (e.g., longer preceding vowel durations, etc.) tended to devoice German final stops to a lesser extent.

Prosodic characterization of reading styles using audio book corpora

Although native English speakers have strong intuitions about the felicity of different reading styles, it is unclear which properties of read speech contribute to these reactions. Although the prosodic structures of read speech and spontaneous speech have been shown to differ (Howell and Kadi-Hanifi, 1991; Blaauw, 1994), it is not clear whether similar prosodic factors contribute to the perception of different reading styles as more felicitous nor even whether such differences can be systematically quantified. A large-scale corpus analysis of read speech was conducted to shed more light on the prosodic characteristics of those reading styles preferred and dispreferred by native speakers of American English. Audio book recordings of classic works of English literature by male and female American readers were rated by native speakers. The two most and least preferred renditions were transcribed at lexical and phonemic levels using SailAlign (Katsamanis, 2011). A variety of metrics were calculated to characterize prosodic properties of each of the readers, including %V, VarCoV, VarCoC, and nPVI (Grabe, &amp; Low 2002; Stojanovic, 2009). The results suggest that although listeners exhibit a preference for syllabic regularity, the perceived felicity of reading styles results from a combination of factors. [Work supported by NIH].

Lexical and metrical cues for English word segmentation by Mandarin second language learners of English

This paper investigates the roles of lexical cues and metrical cues in word segmentation by Mandarin L2 learners of English with high and low English proficiency. A cross-modal form priming paradigm is adopted in the experiment. In the experiment, 33 participants (16 advanced learners, 17 beginning learners) heard a five-syllable phrase (e.g., anythingcorri, anything is the and corri is the ′), produced by a native American English speaker. After 100 ms, a three-syllable letter string (e.g., the corridor) was shown on the screen. The participants task was to decide whether a target was a real word. The contexts, primes, and targets have real word and non-word version and have either SW or WS (S: strong; W: weak) stress patterns. The results indicate that: (1) Lexical cues are the main strategy for advanced learners; (2) Beginning learners rely more on metrical cues; (3) When the stress pattern of contexts and primes are identical, it took participants less time to response. The results support previous studies that lexical and metrical are the cues listeners would rely on when doing segmentation. Furthermore, the results suggest that the strategies listeners rely on would change as they become more proficient in English.

Resonances and wave propagation velocity in the subglottal airways

Previous studies of subglottal resonances have reported findings based on relatively few subjects, and the relations between these resonances, subglottal anatomy, and models of subglottal acoustics are not well understood. In this study, accelerometer signals of subglottal acoustics recorded during sustained [a:] vowels of 50 adult native speakers (25 males, 25 females) of American English were analyzed. The study confirms that a simple uniform tube model of subglottal airways, closed at the glottis and open at the inferior end, is appropriate for describing subglottal resonances. The main findings of the study are (1) whereas the walls may be considered rigid in the frequency range of Sg2 and Sg3, they are yielding and resonant in the frequency range of Sg1, with a resulting ~4/3 increase in wave propagation velocity and, consequently, in the frequency of Sg1; (2) the "acoustic length" of the equivalent uniform tube varies between 18 and 23.5 cm, and is approximately equal to the height of the speaker divided by an empirically determined scaling factor; (3) trachea length can also be predicted by dividing height by another empirically determined scaling factor; and (4) differences between the subglottal resonances of males and females can be accounted for by height-related differences.

Temporal and spectral characteristics of fricatives in dysarthria

Imprecise production of fricatives has been noted in various types of dysarthria, but their acoustic properties have not been fully investigated. Using durational measures and spectral moment analysis, this study examines the acoustic characteristics of alveolar and post-alveolar voiceless fricatives produced by speakers with cerebral palsy (CP) in three different intelligibility levels. The following questions are addressed: (1) Are fricatives longer in CP-associated dysarthric speech, compared to controls? (2) What is the evidence of reduced acoustic distinctions between alveolar vs. post-alveolar fricatives? and (3) Are the intelligibility levels associated with acoustic measures of fricatives? Duration and the first three spectral moments were obtained from word initial fricatives produced by 18 American English native speakers (9 speakers diagnosed with spastic CP and 9 controls). Results showed that speakers with CP exhibited significantly longer duration of fricatives and a reduced distinction between alveolar versus post-alveolar fricatives compared to control speakers. A reduced place distinction in dysarthric speech was mostly due to lower first moments and higher third moments compared to normal speech. The group difference was greater for alveolar fricatives than for post-alveolar fricatives. Furthermore, as the intelligibility level decreased, durational increase and the degree of place overlap were consistently greater.

The Mid and Low Vowel Systems of Korean-English Bilingual Speakers

This study investigates the structure of the mid and low vowel systems of bilingual speakers of Korean and English, and considers how some current theories of phonetics learning would model their bilingual vowel system. Nine native speakers of Seoul Korean, nine native speakers of American English, and seven early bilingual speakers of Korean and English participated in this study. The native speakers of Korean also served as late of English. Five monophthong mid and low vowels of Korean and English were read in carrier phrases, and their F1 and F2 frequency values were measured. The early bilinguals exhibited native-like F1 and F2 values for most of the Korean and English vowel categories. Also, the Korean vowels [e] and [?], and English vowels [?] and [?] were realized as merged forms in their speech, just as in that of the native speakers of each language. On the other hand, the late did not achieve native-like values for most of the English vowel categories. The vowel space size of the late learners English was larger than that of the native speakers of English and similar to that of their Korean. These results demonstrate that the age of learning effect can be modeled in terms of the Speech Learning Model (e.g., Flege 1995) and Exemplar-based Model (e.g., Foulkes & Docherty 2006), both of which emphasize the role of linguistic experience in phonetics learning. Finally, there were no clear indications of a reorganization of the phonemes of the two languages within a unified bilingual phonetic system.

Proficiency in English sentence stress production by Cantonese speakers who speak English as a second language (ESL)

The present study examined English sentence stress produced by native Cantonese speakers who were speaking English as a second language (ESL). Cantonese ESL speakers' proficiency in English stress production as perceived by English-speaking listeners was also studied. Acoustical parameters associated with sentence stress including fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and intensity were measured from the English sentences produced by 40 Cantonese ESL speakers. Data were compared with those obtained from 40 native speakers of American English. The speech samples were also judged by eight naïve listeners who were native speakers of American English for placement, degree, and naturalness of stress. Results showed that Cantonese ESL speakers were able to use F0, vowel duration, and intensity to differentiate sentence stress patterns. Yet, both female and male Cantonese ESL speakers exhibited consistently higher F0 in stressed words than English speakers. Overall, Cantonese ESL speakers were found to be proficient in using duration and intensity to signal sentence stress, in a way comparable with English speakers. In addition, F0 and intensity were found to correlate closely with perceptual judgement and the degree of stress with the naturalness of stress.

Automatic Prediction of Children's Reading Ability for High-Level Literacy Assessment

Automatic literacy assessment technology can help children acquire reading skills by providing teachers valuable feedback in a repeatable, consistent manner. Recent research efforts have concentrated on detecting mispronunciations during word-reading and sentence-reading tasks. These token-level assessments are important since they highlight specific errors made by the child. However, there is also a need for more high-level automatic assessments that capture the overall performance of the children. These high-level assessments can be viewed as an interpretive extension to token-level assessments, and may be more perceptually relevant to teachers and helpful in tracking performance over time. In this paper, we model and predict the overall reading ability of young children reading a list of English words aloud. The data consist of audio recordings, collected in real kindergarten to second grade classrooms from children from native English- and Spanish-speaking households. This research is broken into two main parts. The first part is a user study, in which 11 human evaluators rated the children on their overall reading ability based on the audio recordings. The evaluators were volunteers from a diverse background, seven of whom were native speakers of American English and four that were fluent speakers of English as a secondary language. While none of the evaluators were trained reading experts or licensed teachers, a subset of them were linguists and researchers with experience in automatic literacy assessment. As part of this work, we analyzed the effect of the evaluator's background on inter-evaluator agreement. In the second part, we ran machine learning experiments to predict evaluators' scores using features automatically extracted from the audio. The features were human-inspired and correlated with cues human evaluators stated they used: pronunciation correctness, speaking rate, and fluency. We investigated various automated methods to verify the correctness of the word pronunciations and to detect disfluencies in the children's speech using held-out annotated data. Using linear regression techniques, we automatically predicted individual evaluators' high-level scores with a mean Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.828, and we predicted average evaluator's scores with correlation 0.946. Both these human-machine agreement statistics exceeded the mean inter-evaluator agreement statistics.

Automatic estimation of the first subglottal resonance

This letter focuses on the automatic estimation of the first subglottal resonance (Sg1). A database comprising speech and subglottal data of native American English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers was used for the analysis. Data from 11 speakers (five males and six females) were used to derive an empirical relation among the first formant frequency, fundamental frequency, and Sg1. Using the derived relation, Sg1 was automatically estimated from voiced sounds in English and Spanish sentences spoken by 22 different speakers (11 males and 11 females). The error in estimating Sg1 was less than 50 Hz, on average.

Diphthong formant transitions in four speaking tasks.

Diphthongs have been demonstrated to have longer durations and to involve more extensive articulatory gestures, reflected as larger frequency changes, when compared to monophthongs [Lehiste, I., and Peterson, G. E., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 33, 268–277 (1961); Holbrook, A. and Fairbanks, G., J. Speech Hear. Res. 5, 38–58 (1962)]. However, limited work has documented the nature of diphthong variability. This study describes and examines diphthong formant transitions in the speech production of ten healthy male native speakers of American English, with Wisconsin dialects, to identify and evaluate the pattern, if any, of diphthong variability in four speaking tasks: conversational speech, story reading, sentence in citation form, sentence in clear speech. The study is motivated by the phenomenon of vowel reduction [Lindblom, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 35, 1773–1781 (1963)], which has been documented widely for monophthongs, as well as speaking rate-induced changes in diphthong formant transitions [Gay, T., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 44, 1570–1573 (1968)]. Five diphthongs /eɪ/, /ɑɪ/, /ɑU/, /oU/, and /ɔɪ/ in American English are included, and formant transition measures, including transition duration, transition extent, and derived slope (i.e., transition extent/duration) are used for analysis. Findings are discussed within the framework of the acoustic theories of speech production.

Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners

The results reported in this paper indicate that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese rate the perceptual similarities among the lexical tones of Mandarin differently than do native speakers of American English. Mandarin listeners were sensitive to tone contour while English listeners attended to pitch levels. Chinese listeners also rated tones that are neutralized by phonological tone sandhi rules in Mandarin as more similar to each other than did English speakers – indicating a role of phonology in determining perceptual salience. In two further experiments, we found that some of these differences were eliminated when the listening task focused listeners’ attention on the auditory properties of the stimuli, but, interestingly, a degree of language specificity remained even in the most purely psychophysical listening tasks with speech stimuli.

Prosodic and segmental conversion between speakers of different dialects.

Previous work has found that speakers converge to each other’s production, as evaluated for acoustic properties of segments and in perceptual tasks [S. Fowler, J. Phonetics 25, 421–426 (1995); Pardo, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 2382–2393 (2006); Tobin, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 2757 (2009)]. Little is known about convergence on prosodic properties [L. Schweitzer, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 128, 2458 (2010)]. An experiment is presented that examines how interaction between native speakers of British English and American English affects segmental and prosodic properties. The synchronous speech paradigm (Cummins, ARLO, 3, 7–11 (2002); Z. Cummins Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (2003), pp. 777–780), where two speakers read sentences at the same time, is used. Dyads consisting of one British and one American speaker read a short story that contained four words where the two dialects differ in stress pattern and ten target words where the dialects differ in vowels. The following variables are examined: vowel formant structure, vowel duration, VOT, F0 contours, stress pattern, phrasing, and pitch accent. The goal is to investigate how speakers converge to each other’s speech, and whether segmental and prosodic properties converge to the same degree. Data for dyads consisting of speakers of American English and Indian English are currently being collected.