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Linguistics
Languages & Communication Bldg
255 S Central Campus Dr Rm 2300
Salt Lake City, Ut 84112-0492

Office: 2306 LNCO
Office Phone: (801) 581-5512
Email:

>> Curriculum Vitae
My Website: www.linguistics.utah.edu/speechlab/

This project explores two questions about the nature of foreign accentedness using experimental data from L2 Russian speakers. First, it addresses the issue of the identity of the speaker and listener in assessments of accentedness. Second, it explores the relationship between global ratings of accentedness and ratings given for individual segments and sentence-level prosody.

Collaborators: Jane Hacking;

Project Grants: Mini-Grant: College of Humanities 2006

Among the challenges of acquiring a second language is acquiring the sound system, or phonology, of the language. This is notoriously difficult for learners when the native and second languages have different inventories of sounds and different systems of sound contrasts, and results in what is observed as a ‘foreign accent’. Native English speakers’ foreign accent in Arabic results in part from an unfamiliar set of sounds in Arabic that are not present in English: Arabic has pharyngealized consonants, which contrast with their non-pharyngealized counterparts (e.g. /d/ and /d/, as in the pair of words [dw] ‘medicine’ and [dw] ‘he lit’). Because English has only non-pharyngealized consonants (e.g. /d/), native English speakers typically have difficulty appropriately contrasting these sounds when producing and listening to Arabic. Although there exists an extensive literature that investigates learners’ production and perception ability for sounds in a second language, relatively little research has specifically investigated the role of memory on learners’ speech patterns. The proposed research aims to address this gap by comparing performance by native English speakers learning Arabic on various tasks.

Tasks that rely on memory are called lexical tasks—they require reference by the speaker/listener to the lexicon, or ‘mental dictionary’, and include tasks like picture naming. On the other hand, there are tasks that do not rely on memory—they are called non-lexical tasks, and include tasks like sound discrimination (‘Do these two words sound the same or different: [dw], [dw]?’). Lexical tasks more closely approximate ‘real-life’ language use; however, they are arguably more demanding on learners, and there is some evidence that learners perform less accurately on lexical than non-lexical tasks. The proposed research builds on these findings via the systematic study of learners’ sound structure and their ability to encode novel sounds in memory. Four studies are proposed, in which native English speakers will be tested on their ability to perceive and/or produce the sounds of Arabic in lexical versus non-lexical tasks.

The proposed research has implications for second language acquisition theory and pedagogy. In particular, the information gained from the proposed research contributes to a fuller understanding of how adult learners comprehend and produce second languages, with the ultimate impact of informing the development of L2 pedagogical materials and techniques.

Collaborators: Asmaa Shehata;

Previous research has shown that different populations of listeners have particular communicative needs, and that speakers often make attempts to accommodate these needs, with mixed results (Bradlow, Torretta, & Pisoni, 1996). A large body of work has examined speakers’ ability to phonologically alter their speech in an attempt to accommodate the needs of listeners. Within this ‘clear speech’ literature, different types of clear speech are typically conflated. For example, some researchers ask talkers to speak as though to a hearing impaired listener (e.g. Picheny et al., 1985; Krause & Braida, 2002), others to a non-native listener (e.g. Uther et al., 2007; Biersack, Kempe, & Knapton, 2005), and still others elicit speech directed to “a hearing impaired or non-native listener” (e.g. Bradlow & Alexander, 2006; Bradlow & Bent, 2002). However, although some research has compared the different phonological adjustments talkers make to their speech when addressing different target audiences, it does not necessarily follow that these adjustments are helpful to listeners; the author is aware of no research that has directly compared the effects of these phonological adjustments on intelligibility. The present study directly compared the intelligibility of non-native and hearing impaired directed speech for non-native listeners. Non-native listeners completed a sentence transcription task for non-native and hearing impaired directed speech. Results showed no significant difference in performance between the two conditions (p=.718, partial eta squared=.005), indicating that although talkers may be making different phonological adjustments when addressing non-native versus hearing impaired listeners, these adjustments may not significantly affect the level of intelligibility for non-native listeners. This has important implications on the effectiveness of ‘clear speech’ and the assumption that clear speech is something a native speaker can simply do as a part of his/her native competence.

Collaborators: Sadie Dickman;

The study investigates how teachers vs. non-teachers perceive the accents of German learners. It is partially supported with a research mini-grant from the College of Humanities.

Collaborators: Johanna Watzinger-Tharp;

Vowels following Arabic pharyngealized consonants have lower F2 values than vowels following nonpharyngealized consonants. Due to this difference in F2, native English listeners may be able to exploit their sensitivity to English front-back vowel contrasts to detect pharyngealization contrasts. For example, the vowel in /tɑ:/ may be perceived by English listeners as closer to English /æ/ and the vowel in /tʕɑ:/ as closer to English /ɑ/. This hypothesis was tested in the present study in an acoustic comparison of the Arabic and English vowel space, and in two listening tasks: a cross-linguistic vowel identification task and an AXB discrimination task. We found differential vowel identification patterns for the Arabic vowel /ɑ/ in plain versus pharyngealized contexts (as /æ/ and /ɑ/ respectively), but not for /i/ nor /u/. Participants also exhibited more accurate discrimination of pharyngealization contrasts when the following vowel was /ɑ/ than when it was /i/ or /u/. These findings suggest that vowel context mediates native English listeners’ ability to discern Arabic pharyngealization contrasts.

Collaborators: Kaitlin Bolewicz;
Aleksandra Zaba;