Vortrag: Phonetic Convergence in German non-native speech

The analysis is based on the project entitled "Automated analysis of phonetic convergence in speech technology systems". The project of the Faculty of Modern Languages of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań was supported by the grant Harmonia 6 awarded by the National Science Centre in Poland.

To ascertain whether or not there was an increased measurable convergence in non-native speech and how that was influenced by the interlocutor and the outer circumstances, non-native speakers were put in diverse dialogue scenarios. The test subjects were ten native speakers of Polish. They were asked to first read and afterwards repeat four utterances after a test moderator who was a native speaker of German. There were five tasks included in the experiment. A reading task, where the speakers had to read out loud the sentences including the target utterances, which was done separately for each participant, and four speaking tasks in pairs. The correctness of the sounds was determined by audiovisual analysis. There is an overall improvement tendency. Improvement is visible in the sounds /e:/, /x/, and /œ/, while there is a decline in the longer sound /ø:/. Since the sound /e:/ is in different places in the sentence, there is a different improvement ratio. The range of improvement in the sound /x/ was from 40-50% to 90-100%. In the case of “ö” pronounced as /ø:/ and /œ/ the variation of the sound might have caused problems. In this sound pair /ø:/ was pronounced as /œ/ by three participants. Overall, those two sounds have the largest variation of mispronunciation. They are pronounced as /ɪ/, /u/, /ɛ/, /ɛɪ/ and /y/. The length of the sound itself did not correlate with neither the round number nor the correctness of the pronounced sound, but there was a visible tendency, looking at the length of the vowels only. The sound length was determined by isolating and measuring the audible sound length in the linguistic program Praat. The key take-away from the experiment is that repetition of sounds after native speakers of a language can, at least in the case of German being the tested second language and Polish being their native language, improve the correctness of the pronunciation in a mentor-learner environment.

Materials available upon request under stefania.pikus@gmail.com

Info

Tag: 28.05.2022
Anfangszeit: 16:00
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: Living Lab (1.34)
Track: Phonetics and Phonology
Sprache: en

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