Towards a Gradual Scale of Vowel Reduction: A Pilot Study

Kul, Małgorzata

doi:10.2478/v10010-010-0022-6

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 50 publications

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“…Sound acquisition research has attempted to account for vowel reduction from both a phonetic and a phonological perspective (Fourakis 1991;Barnes 2006). Among the phonetic accounts, this phenomenon has been described as vowels loosing acoustic, durational and intensity traits (Lindblom 1963;Harris 2005) on account of aspects such as unstress, frequency of occurrence, speech style or inter/intraspeaker variability among others (Clopper and Pierrehumbert 2008;Kul 2010). A phonological account of vowel reduction has aimed at describing how in some languages vowels in unstressed syllables undergo a neutralising process by which they lose phonological contrasts (Barnes 2006;Jaworski 2010).…”

Section: Vowel Reduction In English and Spanishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explicit phonetic instruction vs. implicit attention to native exposure: phonological awareness of English schwa in CLIL

Gómez-Lacabex

Puerto

2018

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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The present study aims at determining whether instruction in the form of explicit phonetic training and of implicit exposure to native input impacted Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) students’ phonological awareness of the occurrence of Englishschwain unstressed syllables of content words (bacon). Four intact CLIL groups were administered a perception task immediately before and after an intervention period of one month in which two groups underwent explicit instruction on the incidence of reduced vowels versus full vowels in English disyllabic words while another group was exposed to native input in their CLIL sessions. A fourth CLIL group with neither explicit intervention nor native teacher input served as control group. All four groups tended to judge bothschwasand full vowels as correct in the pre-test, indicating that they were not knowledgeable of the general pattern of vowel reduction occurrence in unstressed syllables in English prior to intervention. In the post-test, the three experimental groups significantly improved their ability to identify full vowels as incorrect, the groups receiving explicit instruction exhibiting higher gains than the group which was implicitly exposed to native input.

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Section: Vowel Reduction In English and Spanishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explicit phonetic instruction vs. implicit attention to native exposure: phonological awareness of English schwa in CLIL

Gómez-Lacabex

Puerto

2018

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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

Brzezicha

Kul

2014

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

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The 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 divided 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.

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Developmental Aspects of Greek Vowel Reduction in Different Prosodic Positions

Christodoulidou,

Nicolaidis,

Stamovlasis

2024

Languages

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This study investigates the development of Greek vowel reduction across different prosodic positions (stressed, pre-stressed, post-stressed), examining normative data from 72 participants aged 3 years to adulthood and balanced for gender. Participants performed a delayed repetition task, producing real trisyllabic words with the vowels [i, ε, ɐ, o, u] examined in the second syllable. Measurements included relative vowel duration, normalized acoustic vowel space areas, and Euclidean distances of vowels from the centroid of the acoustic space. Our findings show that changes in speech motor control, system stiffness, and stress marking with age, along with children’s prosody sensitivity, contributed to several developmental milestones: the completion of the developmental trajectory of relative vowel duration and temporal vowel reduction at early adolescence; the attainment of adult-like spatial vowel characteristics and their reduction at preschool age; and the early acquisition of the prosodic strength of the stress conditions, leading to vowel reduction from the stressed to pre-stressed to post-stressed conditions. The correlation strength between temporal and spatial vowel reduction across ages revealed age-related differences in spatiotemporal speech organization, with significant gender-related differences observed only in vowel space areas, where females exhibited larger areas possibly related to sociophonetic factors. Intrinsic vowel duration appeared from age 3.

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Towards a Gradual Scale of Vowel Reduction: A Pilot Study

Cited by 3 publications

References 50 publications

Explicit phonetic instruction vs. implicit attention to native exposure: phonological awareness of English schwa in CLIL

Explicit phonetic instruction vs. implicit attention to native exposure: phonological awareness of English schwa in CLIL

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

Developmental Aspects of Greek Vowel Reduction in Different Prosodic Positions

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