15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
Several temporal features of English were examined to determine the
extent of their occurrence in the speech of talkers of Chinese-accented
English who had relatively limited experience with spoken English.
Data from sentences produced by ten non-native and ten native talkers
indicated that the two groups did not differ significantly in the extent
to which they realized the inherent duration difference between tense
and lax vowels or for syllable-final vowel lengthening. Although the
group of native English talkers showed substantially greater vowel
lengthening before voiced versus before voiceless consonants than the
Chinese-accented group, certain individual, non-native talkers did
show patterns reasonably similar to those of native talkers. In order
to investigate the perceptual consequences of these observations, a
follow-up study was designed with a focus on the vowel duration difference
before voiced versus voiceless consonants. This investigation tested
the abilities of native and non-native listeners to identify words
produced by native English-speaking subjects and by Chinese-accented
talkers who exhibited varying amounts of vowel lengthening before voiced
versus voiceless consonants, in order to assess the impact of this
temporal parameter on intelligibility.
Bibliographic reference. Smith, Bruce / Bradlow, Ann R. / Bent, Tessa (2003): "Production and perception of temporal contrasts in foreign-accented English", In ICPhS-15, 519-522.