Production Of Native Speakers Research Articles

On experimental lexical production in Spanish as L1 and L2.

This study investigates lexical production in Spanish as L1 and L2 in an experimental context. Based on a series of lexical availability tasks, words produced by native and non-native speakers of Spanish are contrasted in relation to test modality, oral or written, and response time. The production of native speakers is characterized by being significantly higher and more accurate, while L2 responses reflect lower lexical competence, the influence of L1 and divergent acquisition patterns. Although previous studies had not found significant differences between the number of responses produced orally and in writing, we find that such differences exist, but that they are conditioned by the response time, which affects differently the production in L1 and in L2, although their evolution describes a similar trajectory in both cases. This methodological factor would also cause the neutralization of the qualitative differences between oral and written responses in both groups of participants.

¿Enseñanza explícita o imitación? Cómo desarrollar algunos rasgos suprasegmentales en la producción oral de estudiantes de español hungaroparlantes

Some former studies (Baditzné, 2019 and 2020; Kovács, in press) suggest the lack of chaining or fluency in the speech of Hungarian B2 CEFR level students of Spanish. On the basis of these previous results, we pose the question whether the pronunciation of Hungarian learners regarding these aspects can be further improved by making them aware of the phenomena of synalepha and resyllabification, and if so, which one is more effective: practicing its use through different simple activities, or the imitation of the oral production of native speakers. To answer the research question, the oral production (in the form of reading) of 10 Hungarian students was analysed regarding the synalepha and resyllabification, before and after they had participated in a brief individual training on the suprasegmental traits in question or who had been exposed to an authentic recording with native speech. According to our data, which can be considered preliminary, it is the explicit training that contributes to a greater extent to a more successful acquisition of the two phenomena.

Use of Discourse Marker ‘so’ in the Malaysian ESL Job Interviews

The discourse marker ‘so’ has been identified as being typically high in spoken discourse, but previous studies have been focusing on its use in the oral production of native speakers. This paper explores the use of ‘so’, concentrating on job interview speech in the Malaysian English as a Second Language (ESL) context. It aims to explicate the multifunctional uses of ‘so’ in a self-developed corpus made up of 16 actual job interviews conducted in English, comprising job interviews in two different organizations in Malaysia. In the corpus, ‘so’ is identified as the tenth most frequent word, which also makes it the most-used discourse marker in the job interview speech. The results suggest that ‘so’ in the corpus serves five main functions, namely 1) to introduce summary; 2) to continue previous speaker’s topic; 3) to mark sequential relations; 4) to hold the floor; and 5) to introduce elaboration to justify a prior statement. Interestingly, when ‘so’ is used in turn-initials, it points to a specific function which is 6) to introduce new information. However, it was also found that the high frequency of ‘so’ in the corpus is associated with ‘pseudo-bridging’ whereby ‘so’ is simply used to 7) add new information and making speech seem coherent. The study implies that the teaching of discourse markers in speech, specifically the use of ‘so’ should focus more on the pragmatic functions than on semantic meanings per se, to avoid the inappropriate or overuse of this particular linguistic element.

Formulaic Language in Spoken EFL Teaching

This paper discusses the role of formulaic language in the teaching of English as a foreign language, and in particular in the decoding of the spoken production of native speakers (NSs).

Phonetic Feature Interpretation in Second Language Phonology: The Acquisition of the Final Obstruent Voicing Contrast

Although languages may share certain phonological features, their phonetic realizations can be variable. The classical example is the difference in VOT as the underlying factor of the binary distinction in voicing. In this paper, we examine the voicing contrast of English final obstruents (plosives and fricatives) in the production of native speakers of Serbian. The paper reports the results of a production experiment, in which 14 relatively proficient speakers of English as L2 read eight monosyllabic words (minimal pairs) inside frame sentences. Although both English and Serbian contrast final voiced and voiceless obstruents, the results indicate that L2 speakers in our study have not fully mastered the phonetic realization of word-final voicing in English, but greatly retain the phonetic realization of voicing typical of their L1.

A comparison between native and non-native speech for automatic speech recognition

This study investigates differences in sentence and story production between native and non-native speakers of English for use with a system of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Previous studies have shown that production errors by non-native speakers of English include misproduced segments (Flege, 1995), longer pause duration (Anderson-Hsieh and Venkatagiri, 1994), abnormal pause location within clauses (Kang, 2010), and non-reduction of function words (Jang, 2009). The present study uses phonemically balanced sentences from TIMIT (Garofolo et al., 1993) and a story to provide an additional comparison of the differences in production by native and non-native speakers of English. Consistent with previous research, preliminary results suggest that non-native speakers of English fail to produce flaps and reduced vowels, insert or delete segments, engage in more self-correction, and place pauses in different locations from native speakers. Non-native English speakers furthermore produce different patterns of intonation from native speakers and produce errors indicative of transfer from their L1 phonology, such as coda deletion and vowel epenthesis. Native speaker productions also contained errors, the majority of which were content-related. These results indicate that difficulties posed by English ASR systems in recognizing non-native speech are due largely to the heterogeneity of non-native production.

Using naïve listener imitations of native speaker productions to investigate mechanisms of listener-based sound change

This study was designed to test whether listener-based sound change—listener misperception (Ohala, 1981, 1993) and perceptual cue re-weighting (Beddor, 2009, 2012)—can be observed synchronically in a laboratory setting. Co-registered articulatory data (degree of nasalization, tongue height, breathiness) and acoustic data (F1 frequency) related to the productions of phonemic oral and nasal vowels of Southern French were first collected from four native speakers, and the acoustic recordings were subsequently presented to nine Australian English naive listeners, who were instructed to imitate the native productions. During these imitations, similar articulatory and acoustic data were collected in order to compare the articulatory strategies used by the two groups. The results suggest that the imitators successfully reproduced the acoustic distinctions made by the native speakers, but that they did so using different articulatory strategies. The articulatory strategies for the vowel pair /ɑ/-/a/ suggest that listeners (at least partially) misperceived F1-lowering due to nasalization and breathiness as being due to tongue height. Additional evidence supports perceptual cue re-weighting, in that the naive imitators employed nasalance less, and tongue height more, in order to obtain the same F1 nasal-oral distinctions that the native speakers had originally produced.

Profiling the collocation use in ELT textbooks and learner writing

The present study investigates the collocational profiles of (1) three series of graded textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) commonly used in Taiwan, (2) the written productions of EFL learners, and (3) the written productions of native speakers (NS) of English. These texts were examined against a purpose-built collocation list. Based on the British National Corpus (BNC), the collocation list comprises 43,875 verb–noun collocations, the nodes of which were drawn from a prescribed wordlist (Jeng, Chang, Cheng, & Gu, 2002) to be learned on completion of the secondary education in Taiwan. Findings show that overall the collocational density and diversity of the textbooks are comparable to those of NS essays. Nonetheless, only small proportions of collocations within the repertoire were presented in the textbooks, and these collocations did not recur enough for the learner to consolidate collocational knowledge. Compared with their NS equivalents, learners’ writing exhibited an inordinate degree of collocational density and limited collocational diversity, suggesting that they did have the need to construct utterances with collocations, but were inhibited by a underdeveloped sense of collocational knowledge. Implications for learning/teaching collocations and materials designing are discussed.

Formulaic Sequences as Fluency Devices in the Oral Production of Native Speakers of Polish

In this paper we attempt to determine the nature and strength of the relationship between the use of formulaic sequences and productive fluency of native speakers of Polish. In particular, we seek to validate the claim that speech characterized by a higher incidence of formulaic sequences is produced more rapidly and with fewer hesitation phenomena. The analysis is based on monologic speeches delivered by 45 speakers of L1 Polish. The data include both the recordings and their transcriptions annotated for a number of objective fluency measures. In the first part of the study the total of formulaic sequences is established for each sample. This is followed by determining a set of temporal measures of the speakers' output (speech rate, articulation rate, mean length of runs, mean length of pauses, phonation time ratio). The study provides some preliminary evidence of the fluency-enhancing role of formulaic language. Our results show that the use of formulaic sequences is positively and significantly correlated with speech rate, mean length of runs and phonation time ratio. This suggests that a higher concentration of formulaic material in output is associated with faster speed of speech, longer stretches of speech between pauses and an increased amount of time filled with speech.

Suprasegmental features of Chinese‐accented English.

This study compares read speech by Cantonese and Mandarin learners of English with those by native speakers of English. The utterances produced by learners of English are all rated as accented. We aim to identify measurable prosodic differences leading to such perceptual judgment. The prosodic correlates we examine include both syllable duration and pitch values. Our preliminary results reveal in generally mean syllable durations of Cantonese and Mandarins learners are very similar, and much longer than that of the native speakers of English. It is also found that all learners’ production exhibits much greater variations in duration than native speakers. Examination on duration of stressed and unstressed syllables reveals more differences across L1 groups. With regard to pitch correlates, a much wider pitch range is found in the production of native speakers of English than in those of both Mandarin and Cantonese learners of English. Of the Chinese learners, Mandarin group employ a wider pitch range than Cantonese. Moreover, Cantonese learners’ speech is found dominated by a rather “flat” overall pitch contour. We propose that the prosodic deviations in Chinese learners’ English from a native speaker can be accounted for from the perspective of rhythmic and tone system in Chinese.

The production and perception of English consonant sequences by Japanese‐speaking learners of English.

This study reports the second part of a study investigating modifications of nonnative consonant sequences among Japanese speakers. A previous study (Sperbeck, 2009) that measured categorial discrimination demonstrated that some contrastive CC(C)V versus C\schwa\C(C)V sequences were hard for Japanese listeners (71% correct overall). Specifically, perceptual discrimination of voiced stops plus liquids contexts was poor for Japanese listeners (67% correct). The current study explored difficulties in production and how production correlated with perception. Nonsense words were constructed as the stimuli. They were of the form /CC(C)ani/ and /C\schwa/C(C)ani/, where CC(C) combinations were /sp, sk, pl, kl, bl, gl, spl, skl/. A delayed imitation task was used to assess production. Participants heard a native speaker's productions (e.g., Say blani now) twice, produced the target word in isolation (e.g., blani), and then produced it in the carrier sentence (e.g., I said blani now). Two phonetically trained native English speakers perceptually transcribed the productions. Results showed that the overall percent correct was 64% among Japanese speakers. There was a significant correlation between perception and production performance (rho = + 0.78. p < 0.01). However, the major error type was vowel deletion, rather than vowel epenthesis in producing the C\schwa\CV tokens.

Speech Error Elicitation and Co-occurrence Restrictions in two Ethiopian Semitic Languages

This article reports the results of speech error elicitation experiments investigating the role of two consonant co-occurrence restrictions in the productive grammar of speakers of two Ethiopian Semitic languages, Amharic and Chaha. Higher error rates were found with consonant combinations that violated co-occurrence constraints than with those that had only a high degree of shared phonological similarity or low frequency of co-occurrence. Sequences that violated two constraints had the highest error rates. The results indicate that violations of consonant co-occurrence restrictions significantly increase error rates in the productions of native speakers, thereby supporting the psychological reality of the constraints.

Pausing, preceding and following 'that' in English

While reading or speaking, individuals break up sentences into ‘meaningful chunks’. This is true of any individual with any language background. Failure to do so, in an L2 context, leads to idiosyncrasies, and may possibly create some comprehensibility problems. In this study, native and non-native speakers of English read an authentic text into a tape recorder; individual recordings were analysed in terms of intrasentential pauses where ‘that’ clauses began. The places and duration of stops preceding and following ‘that’ were identified and measured. Findings suggest that while pauses preceding ‘that’ are much longer than following ‘that’ in the production of native speakers, the pauses of Turkish speakers of English were found to be just the opposite. The findings of this research can be utilized in speaking and reading classes of English.

Tonal production of early and late Canadian Cantonese bilinguals

Previous studies show that native speakers have exhibited changes in both phonetic and phonemic characteristics in their L1 production and perception after living in an L2 community for years. Little is known if the phenomenon is also present in the tonal production of native speakers of tone languages who grew up in an English-speaking environment. This research examines both the phonetic and phonemic features of the six Cantonese tones (i.e., vowel duration, pitch contour, and tonal space) produced by two groups of adult Canadian Cantonese bilinguals: early (AOA: less than 1 year) and late (AOA: 10–13 years). The data collected were compared with those of a group of native Cantonese speakers (AOA: greater than 18 years). Analyses revealed that (i) both the early and the late bilinguals produced significantly longer vowel durations than did the comparison group, and that (ii) their pitch contours and tonal space were significantly different from those of the native speakers. In addition, the early bilinguals’ tonal productions were more deviant from the native productions than those of the late bilinguals.

Production of Japanese durational contrasts by native and nonnative speakers

Non-native speakers’ production of Japanese durational contrasts, and the development of their abilities, are examined in relation to native speakers’ production. Two native speakers and two beginning learners produced 2–4 mora words contrasting in either consonant or vowel length. The learners also produced the same set of words after 4 weeks of perceptual training [Y. Hirata, CLS34 Phonetics Panel (forthcoming)]. Acoustic analyses of the native speaker productions indicate durational systematicity not only in the consonant pairs, as in M. Han [Phonetica 49, 102–127 (1992)], but also in the vowel pairs: the average ratio of short to long vowels was 1:1.8–2.0 regardless of context and speaker. Furthermore, a linear relationship was found between the number of morae and word duration, extending Port et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 81, 1574–1585 (1987)]. The learners’ results before training indicate an inability to produce the durational contrasts, e.g., subject A’s average durational ratio for the vowel pairs was 1:1.2. After training, the ratio became closer to that of the native speakers, viz., 1:1.6–1.7, while subject B’s did not show a linguistically significant change. Subject A’s results contrast even with those of Han’s advanced subjects, and illuminate the upper limit for L2 learners with training.

Intonational foreign accent in the speech of American speakers of German

The F0 patterns typical of German and American English are analyzed within the framework of a category-based description of intonation events as established by the ToBI prosodic transcription system. This description is supplemented by intonation rules for the categories’ phonetic implementation. The rules are also the basis for the process of F0 generation and resynthesis, which facilitates determining which aspects in non-native speech are responsible for the perception of intonational foreign accent. An analysis of the productions of native speakers of American English who are fluent in German shows a distinct influence of L1 prosodic characteristics on L2. It consists of a transfer of native prosodic settings to L2. Several types of intonational foreign accent are identified. Tonal categories, such as pitch accents or boundary tones, are affected in two ways: either an incorrect category is selected or it is assigned to an inappropriate part of the intonation phrase. Transfer effects are particularly distinct in the American speakers’ phonetic realization of corresponding tonal categories. The Americans also maintain other prosodic language-specific features like pitch range. Overall, prosodic behavior in L2 acquisition seems quite similar to segmental behavior and in accordance with current models of segmental L2 acquisition.

‘Si j’étais une pauvre paysanne’ ou les difficultés pragmatiques dans l’argumentation orale des apprenants FLE: Les apports d’une approche pluridimensionnelle

Article ‘Si j’étais une pauvre paysanne’ ou les difficultés pragmatiques dans l’argumentation orale des apprenants FLE: Les apports d’une approche pluridimensionnelle was published on January 1, 1996 in the journal Multilingua (volume 15, issue 4).

Le Traitement Prototypique

This paper presents results from a study of the language production of native speakers and advanced learners. Four groups often speakers (native French, native Italian, Italian learners of French, French learners of Italian) performed a picture description task, and a comparison was made between the information contained in the productions of natives vs. learners, and the linguistic means used to convey this information. It was found that the processing of identical chunks of information ranged along a continuum from the analytic to the synthetic, from learners to natives, respectively. Two examples of this differential processing are discussed in detail: firstly, the division of the discourse into main structure and side structure, and secondly, the locating of entities in the picture. The former distinction emerges much more clearly in learner than in native production, and for the latter function, learners resort more frequently than native speakers to temporal adverbs such as puis/più and particles such as aussi/anche, in addition to purely spatial means. Overall, it is shown that learners have a more neutral way of processing the task (Von Strutterheim's "prototypische Bearbeitung"), and it is argued in conclusion that it is precisely this charactristic of learner production which allows insights into both the structure of (descriptive) discourse and the language production process.