Pitch range, intensity, and vocal fry in non-native and native English focus intonation

Yeung, Alex Hong-Lun; Baek, Hyunah; Takahashi, Chikako; Duncan, Michael; Benedette, Sharon; Hwang, Joonsik; Broselow, Ellen

doi:10.1121/2.0001047

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The hypothesis that listeners were affected by the variability of focus prosody in English is consistent with the fact that both language groups displayed greater sensitivity to adjective-focus prosody than to noun-focus prosody, as revealed by the significant interaction between prosody helpfulness and focus type on response accuracy to masked stimuli (Table 4). This dovetails with other studies suggesting that native speakers of English are more consistent in producing pitch peaks on contrasting adjectives than on contrasting nouns (Ito, Speer & Beckman, 2004;Yeung, Baek, Takahashi, Duncan, Benedett, Hwang & Broselow, 2019), which means that listeners are more likely to hear focused adjectives realized with a contrastive pitch accent in English than to hear focused nouns with contrastive accent. English speakers also seem better able to perceive focus prosody on a prenominal adjective than on the following noun: Ito and Speer (2008) found that felicitous contrastive prosody on a focused adjective, but not on a focused noun, was associated with anticipatory fixations to the target for English speakers, while Wayland, Guerra, Chen, and Zhu (2019) found that both L1-English and L1-Mandarin speakers tended to confuse focus on a phrase-final noun phrase with broad focus prosody, where prominence falls on the final lexical category word of the phrase.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

Hwang

Takahashi²,

Baek³

et al. 2022

Bilingualism

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This study compared the ability of English monolinguals and Mandarin–English bilinguals to make use of English contrastive prosody not only in natural speech but also in masked speech, in which the only available information was prosodic. In contrast to earlier studies (Choi et al., 2019; Choi, 2021; Tong et al., 2015) which found that L1 tone language speakers outperformed native speakers in tasks involving the use of pitch to identify stress position in English, we did not find a similar advantage for Mandarin–English bilinguals in the interpretation of English contrastive prosody, even under conditions that enforced reliance on pitch contours. These findings are consistent with other studies suggesting that the integration of prosodic information into discourse is an area of particular difficulty for L2 speakers.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

Hwang

Takahashi²,

Baek³

et al. 2022

Bilingualism

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show abstract

“…Their results indicated that Chinese speakers produced stressed vowels with shorter duration and unstressed vowels with greater volume than NSs. In a more recent study on the production of English contrastive focus, Yeung et al (2019), after comparing 26 Mandarin speakers and 21 NESs, came to the same conclusion that Mandarin speakers produced focused words with shorter durations. In addition to speaking rate, pausing and stress, pitch has also been identified as a prominent feature distinguishing native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) speech.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 77%

Suprasegmental Differences Between Chinese and International English Instructors in an Efl Context

Meng

2022

Virtual PSLLT

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The comparison of the suprasegmental properties between native English speaker (NES) speech and second/foreign language learner speech exists in abundance. However, little research has been conducted to analyze the pronunciation features of language instructors, not least in an EFL setting. This study aimed to find the suprasegmental differences between Chinese English instructors and international instructors in an EFL classroom context. In order to evaluate this, we compared a two-minute spontaneous sample extracted from an actual lecture given in English by 10 college instructors from China (Mandarin speakers) and 10 college instructors from different English-speaking countries (native English speakers). The speech samples were analyzed in terms of eleven features of interest: syllable per second, articulation rate, mean length of run, phonation time ratio, number of silent pauses, mean length of pauses, number of filled pauses, mean length of filled pauses, number of prominent syllables per run, proportion of prominent syllables, and overall pitch range. The independent T-Tests performed on each variable separately revealed that no significant differences existed between the two groups of instructors except for mean length of pauses. Despite the lack of significantly statistical differences in the majority of the features examined, this study uncovered some revealing findings that are instrumental in enhancing the classroom speech quality for both Chinese and international instructors.

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Acquisition of non-contrastive focus in Russian by adult English-dominant bilinguals

Luchkina,

Ionin,

Goldshtein

2024

Front. Psychol.

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This study investigates the acquisition of sentence focus in Russian by adult English-Russian bilinguals, while paying special attention to the relative contribution of constituent order and prosodic expression. It aims to understand how these factors influence perceived word-level prominence and focus assignment during listening.We present results of two listening tasks designed to examine the influence of pitch cues and constituent order on perceived word prominence (Experiment 1) and focus assignment (Experiment 2) during the auditory comprehension of SV[O]F and OV[S]F sentences in Russian. Our findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: monolingual speakers, as a baseline, tend to perceive the nuclear pitch-accented object as more prominent, particularly in the SVO order, whereas bilinguals appear to be less sensitive to the constituent order distinction.Additionally, baseline speakers consistently assign focus to the sentence-final nuclear pitch-accented noun regardless of constituent order. In contrast, bilinguals demonstrate a preference for assigning focus to the sentence-final nuclear-accented object, rather than the sentence-final nuclear-accented subject. A proficiency effect emerged indicative of a more target-like performance among bilinguals with greater proficiency in Russian.

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Pitch range, intensity, and vocal fry in non-native and native English focus intonation

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

Suprasegmental Differences Between Chinese and International English Instructors in an Efl Context

Acquisition of non-contrastive focus in Russian by adult English-dominant bilinguals

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