Phonetic Training Research Articles

Do they understand more? Turkish EFL speakers perception of sentence stress in English

As one of the most prominent elements of intonation sentence stress frequently contributes to the meaning expressed by speakers. It most typically signals details of an utterance information structure, but it also performs a contrastive or emphasizing function, thus expressing focus in the spoken discourse. In English and many other languages its location, while exhibiting certain regularities it additionally determined by extra relevant or relative information. As such, either alone or in combination, it may communicate certain additional shades of meaning that, similarly to the contribution of sentence intonation, may escape the attention of EFL speakers.
 The paper explores the comprehension sensitivity of Turkish speakers of English when it comes to identifying meaning details contributed by sentence stress. It investigates their awareness as detected through perception of variable sentence stress location. The target group are Turkish advanced speakers of English, with various levels of competence, and only sporadic phonetic training in English for part of them. In a perception-based experiment they were asked to identify the details they perceive. Their results were then compared and analysed, also in relation to what their native language (with a distinction into sentential and focal stress) adds in terms of this module of utterance intonation. Finally, their results were correlated with those achieved by Polish advanced speakers of English as investigated in a similar study conducted earlier. The interpretation of the results reveals that Turkish EFL speakers are more sensitive to the highlighting or contrastive function of sentence stress, achieving overall better result here than when they are to judge its contribution to notion such as politeness or impatience. They are also rather competent at detecting the prominent element in an utterance.

Effects of perceptual training on the perception of Korean boundary tones by Chinese learners

Previous studies have proven that High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) is an effective method for training non-native listeners to discriminate L2 phoneme contrasts or prosodic contrasts, such as Chinese tone and Japanese segment length. However, it still remains uninvestigated whether this training method can be successfully applied to the perceptual training of nondistinctive L2 intonation. This study aims to prove that the HVPT method is also effective in training Chinese learners of Korean to distinguish Korean boundary tones. Korean boundary tones have three important grammatical and pragmatic functions: distinction of declarative and interrogative sentences, distinction of wh- and yes-no questions, and distinction of ambiguous meanings of some terminal endings. Our experiment is designed to train Chinese learners to discriminate these three functions using the HVPT method. 40 Chinese learners participated in 10 online sessions. They were exposed to 276 sentences delivered by different speakers each session. The subjects showed significant improvements in discriminating all three intonational functions in the posttest. Lower proficiency learners showed greater improvements. A notable change occurred in the development of categorical perception. The category boundaries between declarative and interrogative sentences shifted closer to the native speakers’ after the training.

Perceptual phonetic training improves production in larger discourse contexts

Perceptual training can lead to improvements in production which generalize to new words and talkers. This study investigated the effects of perceptual training on productions in larger discourse contexts of continuous speech, and additionally examined whether training generalized to a new syllable structure and across grammatical domains. Participants included Korean L2 learners of English in a pretest-training-posttest design. An experimental group completed perceptual training on singleton coda palatals, and a control group completed training on an unrelated target. Results indicated that perceptual training on singleton coda palatals was successful in significantly improving learners’ productions in continuous speech. Learners were able to generalize production improvements to a new syllable structure (simple vs. complex coda), but not across grammatical domains (-ed morphemes). These findings provide further support for the use of perceptual training in pronunciation classrooms, but demonstrate some limitations to its generalizability.

Research into practice: How research appears in pronunciation teaching materials

Research into pronunciation has often disregarded its potential to inform pedagogy. This is due partly to the historical development of pronunciation teaching and research, but its effect is that there is often a mismatch between research and teaching. This paper looks at four areas in which the (mis)match is imperfect but in which a greater recognition of research can lead to better teaching materials (high variability phonetic training, intonation, information structure, and setting priorities). Furthermore, two areas in which teaching materials are desperate for research to be carried out (connected speech and the primacy of suprasegmentals) will be discussed.

Efficacy in phonetics training for the actor

This paper explores the impact of early introduction of keywords for sound/symbol memorization, teaching the complete repertoire of IPA symbols, IPA transcription of recorded audio, and the efficacy of several experimental teaching techniques in speech training for the actor. The paper is the result of a research study that tested the eight recommendations for phonetics instruction for actors outlined by Phil Thompson. The study gathered data from two focus groups of second-year graduate-level acting students after a year of introductory phonetics, taught within a voice class in a conservatory setting, to explore effective outcomes as well as student self-perception of the effectiveness of Thompson’s recommendations. The paper suggests that existing curricula can be bolstered by implementing aspects of Thompson’s new, rigorous approach, while interrogating both its effectiveness and appropriateness.

Effects of perceptual phonetic training on the perception and production of second language syllable structure

This study investigated the effect of perceptual training on second language (L2) learners' perception and production of syllable structure, thereby shedding light on the relationship between L2 speech perception and production and on the nature of stored representations. Korean L2 learners of English completed perceptual training on palatal codas in a pretest–post-test design. We compared the effects of training on improvements in perception and production for trained and new words and talkers. A control group who completed an unrelated perceptual training was included for comparison. Results indicated that learners who received perceptual training on palatal codas outperformed those who did not in perception and production tasks and generalized learning to new words and new talkers. Yet perception improvements were not directly linked to production improvements. The finding that perceptual training improved production and allowed for generalizability to new words and talkers in both perception and production provides evidence that L2 perception and production systems are linked. However, the lack of a one-to-one relationship between perception and production improvements suggests that the representations underlying L2 speech perception and production may be distinct.

Phonetic Training Significantly Mitigates the Stress ‘Deafness’ of French Speakers

<p>Stress ‘deafness’ refers to the inconsistent perception and/or processing of phonological stress by speakers of fixed stress languages such as French. This paper briefly reports on the results of a study in which French and English participants performed an ABX word stress task, similar to Dupoux et al.’s (1997) Experiment 1. One group of French and a group of English speakers received phonetic training designed to improve perception while two other groups of French and English speakers received no training. The training was an adaptation of the perceptual fading technique, which exposes listeners to stressed syllables that exaggerate the durational correlate of stress, then gradually reduces the durations of subsequent stressed syllables to increase participants’ overall ability to accurately perceive stressed syllables. The trained French group performed significantly better than the untrained group with fewer errors and lower response times. As expected there was no difference in accuracy between the trained and untrained English groups. We argue that by exaggerating the duration cue for stress, the phonetic training led to increased overall perception, perhaps even beginning to build an abstract phonological representation of stress that was then carried into the ABX task. Although trained on artificially manipulated stimuli, participants were able to perform well on naturally-produced novel stimuli.</p>

Media Diversity in the Pronunciation Training in Large Groups of Learners : Evaluation of a German Pronunciation Training

The article presents and interprets a survey conducted among Jordanian learners on didactic and methodological problems in training German pronunciation and discusses respondents’ feedback on the teaching concept at the University of Jordan. The article pursues the question of if and how one can use various media in large groups of learners in pronunciation lessons. It discusses methods of training and identifies the development trends. We conclude that a focused one-semester training with the use of a variety of media is highly recommendable. Moreover, the paper establishes a thesis that songs in pronunciation lessons offer more than just singing or repetition and thus have a high potential for phonetic training.

Phonetic training and non-native speech perception — New memory traces evolve in just three days as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and behavioural measures

Language-specific, automatically responding memory traces form the basis for speech sound perception and new neural representations can also evolve for non-native speech categories. The aim of this study was to find out how a three-day phonetic listen-and-repeat training affects speech perception, and whether it generates new memory traces. We used behavioural identification, goodness rating, discrimination, and reaction time tasks together with mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response registrations to determine the training effects on native Finnish speakers. We trained the subjects the voicing contrast in fricative sounds. Fricatives are not differentiated by voicing in Finnish, i.e., voiced fricatives do not belong to the Finnish phonological system. Therefore, they are extremely hard for Finns to learn. However, only after three days of training, the native Finnish subjects had learned to perceive the distinction. The results show striking changes in the MMN response; it was significantly larger on the second day after two training sessions. Also, the majority of the behavioural indicators showed improvement during training. Identification altered after four sessions of training and discrimination and reaction times improved throughout training. These results suggest remarkable language-learning effects both at the perceptual and pre-attentive neural level as a result of brief listen-and-repeat training in adult participants.

Syllable position effects on perceptual determination of /r/ errors in expert and naive listeners

When ordinary listeners hear words containing a phoneme whose production differs in one feature from the target, the anomaly is often ignored if the word is recognizable. Phonetic research and clinical practice both depend on phonetics training to mitigate these top-down listening effects and enable detection of anomalies. Children with speech sound errors for American English /r/ are believed to have better productions when /r/ occurs at the beginning of a word. However, the shorter duration of /r/ word-initially may be leading clinicians to under-identify errors. While previous studies have shown that clinicians are better than naive listeners at identifying error /r/ in single syllables, they have not assessed identification of /r/ errors in whole words, where position may interact with lexical bias effects. In this study, speech-language pathologists and naive listeners rated children’s natural speech productions of word-initial and word-final/r/ in whole words. These /r/ productions in words were selected to make a continuum defined by normalized third formant values. Reaction times and responses to stimuli were compared between listener groups. Initial results indicate that clinicians and naive listeners differ in their responses to formant profiles of stimuli, but that syllable position exerts a strong effect for both groups.

음성 훈련에 따른 영어 모음의 인지와 발화 관계

음성 훈련에 따른 영어 모음의 인지와 발화 관계

Second-Language Learners’ Identification of Target-Language Phonemes: A Short-Term Phonetic Training Study

Abstract: This study examined the effect of short-term high-variability phonetic training on the perception of English /b/, /v/, /d/, /ð/, /æ/, /#_x028C_#/, /i/, and /i/ by Catalan/Spanish bilinguals learning English as a foreign language. Sixteen English-major undergraduates were tested before and after undergoing a four-session perceptual training program involving a series of discrimination and identification tasks. Although some scores were already high at pre-test, there was improvement from pre-test to post-test, and this improvement generalized to novel words and a novel talker. An effect of word frequency was observed, but this effect was found to decrease after training. The results show that relatively advanced foreign-language learners in an instructional setting may improve in perception as a result of short-term high-variability phonetic training. The implications of these findings for the teaching of pronunciation are discussed.

Children Learning a Non-native Vowel – The Effect of a Two-day Production Training

The aim of this study was to investigate, how young children learn to produce a non-native vowel embedded in a pseudo-word context after short and intensive listen-and-repeat training sessions. The trained vowel contrast was chosen so that it would generate maximal learning difficulties according to models of second language learning. The group consisted of 13 7—10 year old girls. The child subjects participated in the study twice, on two consecutive days. Both days consisted of two training and two recording sessions. The model stimuli were pseudo-words /ty:ti/ and /tʉ:ti/, synthesized using a semi-synthetic method. The primary target word was /tʉ:ti/, which contained the vowel phoneme phonologically irrelevant in Finnish. The two lowest formants and the fundamental frequency were analysed from the recorded vowels. The results revealed that children learned to produce the new vowel after only three training sessions and that the effect was also seen after the fourth session. These results suggest that children learn to produce a new vowel after a short period of phonetic training.

Two Phonetic-Training Procedures for Young Learners: Investigating Instructional Effects on Perceptual Awareness

Abstract: This study investigated the effect of two distinct computer-based phonetic training procedures administered in an English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom with young learners. Students’ perceptual awareness of the occurrence of an English schwa in an unstressed position in content words was tested in two experimental groups, which underwent differentiated training regimes (auditory discrimination/identification practice and listen-and-repeat practice), and a control group, which received no phonetic treatment. A training effect was shown by the significant improvement in the perception abilities of the two experimental groups only. In addition, both experimental groups exhibited comparable improvement in all the variables analyzed. Training effects were also found for the word-familiarity variable, which was mitigated after treatment. Results suggest a positive impact of both aural and imitation computer-based phonetic training on L2 sound perceptual awareness in classroom settings with young learners.

Speech sound learning depends on individuals' ability, not just experience.

The goal of this study was to investigate if phonetic experience with two languages facilitated the learning of novel speech sounds or if general perceptual abilities independent of bilingualism played a role in this learning. The underlying neural mechanisms involved in novel speech sound learning were observed in groups of English monolinguals (n = 20), early Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 24), and experimentally derived subgroups of individuals with advanced ability to learn novel speech sound contrasts (ALs, n = 28) and individuals with non-advanced ability to learn novel speech sound contrasts (non-ALs, n = 16). Subjects participated in four consecutive sessions of phonetic training in which they listened to novel speech sounds embedded in Hungarian pseudowords. Participants completed two fMRI sessions, one before training and another one after training. While in the scanner, participants passively listened to the speech stimuli presented during training. A repeated measures behavioral analysis and ANOVA for fMRI data were conducted to investigate learning after training. The results showed that bilinguals did not significantly differ from monolinguals in the learning of novel sounds behaviorally. Instead, the behavioral results revealed that regardless of language group (monolingual or bilingual), ALs were better at discriminating pseudowords throughout the training than non-ALs. Neurally, region of interest (ROI) analysis showed increased activity in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) bilaterally in ALs relative to non-ALs after training. Bilinguals also showed greater STG activity than monolinguals. Extracted values from ROIs entered into a 2×2 MANOVA showed a main effect of performance, demonstrating that individual ability exerts a significant effect on learning novel speech sounds. In fact, advanced ability to learn novel speech sound contrasts appears to play a more significant role in speech sound learning than experience with two phonological systems.

Effect of phonetic training on the perception of English consonants by Greek speakers in quiet and noise conditions

The present study employed high-variability phonetic training (multiple words spoken by multiple talkers) to improve the identification of English consonants by native speakers of Greek. The trainees completed five sessions of identification training with feedback for seven English consonants (contrasting voiced vs. voiceless stops and alveolar vs. postalveolar fricatives) each consisting of 198 trials with a different English speaker in each session. Another group of Greek speakers served as controls, i.e., completed the pre/post test but received no training. Pre/post tests included English consonant identification in quiet and noise. In the noise condition, participants identified consonants in the presence of a competing English speaker at a signal-to-noise ratio of -2dB. The results showed that training significantly improved English consonant perception for the group that received training but not for the control group in both quiet and noise. The results add to the existing evidence that supports the effectiveness of the high-variability approach to second-language segmental training.

COMPUTER AIDED ARTICULATORY TUTOR: A SCIENTIFIC STUDY

This paper describes the use of Computer Aided Articulation Tutor (CAAT) to conduct phonetic training to the hearing-impaired (HI) children with inner articulators as visual cues. This Articulatory tutor was developed by using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and computer graphics techniques. The articulators include the movement of jaw, lips, tongue and velum. Ten hearing impaired (HI) children between the ages 4 and 7 were selected and trained for 10 hours across 4 weeks on 24 words. Intelligibility of HI children was investigated to find out their performance in speech perception and articulation. The post-training results indicated that HI children improved in articulation of speech sounds placed at different contexts. This 3D visual simulation tool helped HI children in perceiving the speech information significantly.

Language Experience and Phonetic Training as Factors Influencing Timing Organisation in Polish Learners of English

The paper investigates the dynamics of speech rhythm in Polish learners of English and, specifically, how rhythm measurements revealing durational characteristics of vocalic and consonantal intervals through the measures (%V, ΔV, ΔC, VarcoV, VarcoC and nPVI) change along the process of second language acquisition as a result of language experience and phonetic training, and influence rhythmic characteristics of L2 English. The data used for the analysis come from 30 Polish first-year students of the University of Łódź recorded reading two texts (English and Polish) during two recording sessions separated by a 7-month period of language studies and compared to the data obtained from the recordings of native speakers of English. The experiment aims at verifying whether the participants achieve progress in the rhythm measure scores under the influence of language experience and phonetic training, as it has already been confirmed that general proficiency of non-native speakers of English is a key factor contributing to the successful production of rhythmic patterns in English (Waniek-Klimczak 2009, Roach 2002). The results have shown no substantial and consistent progress for the whole group and across all the measures. Statistical tests, however, have revealed significant changes in the subjects' performance with respect to the vocalic measures ΔV and VarcoV. This may reflect the effect of the type of phonetic training the students are offered, which is segment-based with particular emphasis on vowels.

Effects of speech rate, phonetic background and gender on vowel reduction in the speech of nonnative speakers of English

AbstractThe paper reports the results of a study investigating vowel reduction in the speech of non-native speakers of English. The aim was to unravel the links between reduction and speech rate, phonetic training and gender. We hypothesized that (i) Polish speakers of English reduce vowels; (ii) they speak slower than native speakers; (iii) the higher the rate, the higher the reduction degree; (iv) speakers with phonetic training reduce less than those lacking it; (v) male subjects reduce more than the female ones. In order to realize these aims, an acoustic analysis of vowels was performed on 2 hrs 42 mins of speech produced by 12 Polish speakers of English. The subjects were di-vided into an experimental group consisting of 6 students of English and a control group with 6 speakers who had no phonetic training. The obtained results positively verify that non-native speakers reduce vowels and cast some doubts on whether they speak slower than native speakers. The role of rate and gender could not be established due to statistical and methodological issues. The group with no phonetic training outperformed the group which underwent phonetic training, pointing instead to the role of exposure and perhaps music training in acquiring native-like reduction patterns.

Fonética e Fonologia na formação de professores indígenas

This paper discusses the consequences of teaching practices of Phonetics and Phonology in training courses for indigenous teachers. It is argued that the result of training in Phonetics, in a class of indigenous teachers in training, is usually different from the result obtained in a group of native speakers of Portuguese, graduating in Letters. This assessment does not relate to academic achievement, but to representations or beliefs that are established (or reinforced) in indigenous teachers. We point out as the cause of the difference of these results, the history and situation of writing and spellings of languages indigenous minority, compared with the official language. We discuss also deficiencies in the training of researchers in Phonology by Brazilian universities, resulting in limitations of consultancies in the courses in which this matter is "passed on" to the natives. Finally, we suggest lines for work the Phonetics and Phonology in the training of indigenous teachers.