Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 9, Issue 1, 1981

The respective fields of applied linguistics and experimental phonetics are briefly sketched. From this outline it is clear that the field of applied linguistics encompasses a much vaster research area than experimental phonetics. From this it follows that any collaboration by workers in these two fields can only hope to cover a small area of mutual interest.Attention is given to such notions as theoretical, experimental and applied research in general with a view to getting a realistic insight in a possible meeting ground for phoneticians and applied linguists. Special attention is paid to research objectives and techniques characteristic of the approach of experimental phonetics. Specific themes of current interest in this domain, such as the study of prosodic features and the problem of segmenting words from the speech continuum rather than phonemic segments, are discussed in relation with possible research objectives of a similar kind within the study of foreign language teaching. Although no great hopes for revolutionary developments are held out, a number of possible limited research objectives are suggested which may lead to fruitful joint efforts by enlisting the services of experimental phoneticians towards solving some problems in the field of measuring oral proficiency in foreign language training.

Il s'agit d'une recherche réalisée au département de français de l'Université d'Amsterdam. Nous avons enregistré la "performance" d'étudiants de 1ère année qui n'avaient pas encore été exposés à un contact durable avec la langue française.Nous avons distingué cinq niveaux de production, du plus directif-lecture d'un texte - au plus libre - commentaires de bandes dessinées sans légende. Nous avons constaté de nombreuses interférences dues aux influences du système phonologique néerlandais sur le systèmecible. Jusqu'à présent nous avons dépouillé les enregistrements de 28 sujets, représentant plus de 28.000 occurrences de consonnes et voyelles. Il semble que les différents niveaux n'aient joué aucun role déterminant dans les réalisations des locuteurs.

It is sometimes said that those who do not speak their native language with the standard accent will also experience difficulties in acquiring the pronunciation of a foreign language. It would not be easy to demonstrate that this general statement is correct. Data collected from first year students of English at d'Witte Leli in Amsterdam seem to indicate that those students whose pronunciation of Dutch was judged to be closer to ABN were more likely to obtain a good mark for their pronunciation of English.

The point of departure for this investigation were some generally accepted impressionistic statements about durational differences in Dutch and German vowels. An acoustic analysis of utterances spoken by various groups of speakers was carried out. Differences between native speakers and second-language learners were manifest to a varying degree. Long training does not guarantee the best approximation to native performance. Furthermore it is apparent that current ideas about vowel duration in the two languages should be modified: the differences are not so great as generally thought. Phonological factors rather than specific durations are relevant. Unlike Dutch, German vowels are considerably longer before voiced than before voiceless medial consonants.

The purpose of the experiments reported on here was to attain an inventory of systematic intonational deviations observed in English utterances produced by native speakers of Dutch. In two production tests acoustic measurements are described of magnitude, slope, duration, direction and position of fundamental frequency contours, produced by native speakers of Dutch and of English on English utterances.In two perception tests the original capricious fundamental frequency contours (sentence melody) were replaced by experimentally controlled artificial contours, without greatly disturbing the remaining acoustic cues.In this way the perceptual relevance of the deviations could be tested by means of a subjective evaluation by native speakers of English. Finally two experiments are described which are of an exploratory character, in the latter of which use was made of spectrally rotated speech. The overall data of the experiments allow for the following conclusion:(a) British English listeners are able to judge the acceptability of resynthesized pitch contours in a very consistent manner.(b) Deviations which appear to be particularly relevant to the perception of non-nativeness are in order of perceptual importance: Magnitude of the pitch movement, WH-attribute (particular configuration often found on so-called WH-Questions), Direction of the pitch movement, Continuation (complex movement often found before a pause in a speech signal) and occasionally Inclination (slowly rising pitch from Mid to High level).(c) The perceptual relevance of some deviations appeared to be dependent on the linguistic structure of the utterance, viz. Overshoot (rise at end), Reset (virtual jump from Mid to High).The ultimate goal of our investigation is to come to an explicit inventory of perceptually relevant deviations. Suc an inventory would be helpful to establish an elementary set of rules concerning English intonation on behalf of Dutch learners of English.

Speech rate variations often influence scores obtained in tests that aim at establishing a second language learner's listening proficiency. In this study a method will be proposed that may be immune to such variations. This method involves the construction of short speech samples varying in length from one to about ten words. There is evidence from the literature on the intelligibility of such speech fragments that samples of comparable durations are equally intelligible despite differences in speech rate: the sloppy articulation in fast utterances is supposed to be compensated by covering relatively more context.An account is given of two experiments set up to investigate the value of this claim. Results demonstrate that effects of speech rate variations are negligible for samples with average syllable durations beyond 132 milliseconds.Further reports are presented on two investigations into de discriminatory power of the testing procedure proposed. Fragments of speech read out in the second language turn out to be less intelligible than samples read out in the mother tongue. The amount of difference between scores under the two language conditions appears to be a function of the listeners' familiarity with the second language. It is concluded that the method put forward meets the essential requirement of discriminating in listening proficiency between mother tongue and second language and between levels of proficiency as well.Two final experiments were carried out to get more insight into the question of how the fragments might be presented. Voice adaptation effects are shown to play a role in the recognition of speech fragments. It can be inferred that listeners who are first presented with a passage read out by the speaker who pronounces the samples score higher than those who do not get the opportunity to get accustomed to his voice. Consequently it seems sensible to familiarize listeners extensively with the speaker's voice beforehand in order to avoid negative effects of voice adaptation.

The "Cursus Nederlandse Intonatie" (course in Dutch intonation) is a first attempt to teach the intonation of a second language according to a cognitive method, i.e. to provide the students with conscious control of the various patterns of the target language and of the different shapes in which these patterns actually appear. A necessary requirement for achieving this is to convey analytic knowledge about all the important pitch variations. Thanks to profound investigations in this field, such knowledge is now sufficiently available. The main technique applied in these investigations consisted of replacing the natural variation of F in an utterance by a stylized, much simpler artificial pitch contour whilst maintaining the overall melodic impression. This has been done for a great number of utterances; thus, it became possible to make an inventory of the essential ingredients of the artificial contours.The course is expected to be helpful not only to students of Dutch as a second language. Also to those native speakers who professionally study Dutch language and literature, it might be useful to become acquainted with this explicit description of the intonation system which they know already, but only in an implicit way.Recently, in investigation of the intonation of British English has been initiated, using the same technique as the one applied for Dutch intonation. The results obtained so far justify the expectation that a cognitive course of English intonation can be developed as well. This would be an efficient device for the numerous people who learn English as a second language.

A description is given of an experiment in which we tried to show that visual feedback is more effective in intonation learning than auditory feedback. The factors in the experiment were feedback mode and practice time.The results showed a significant effect of visual feedback over auditory feedback, whereas amount of practice time doesn't seem to be a major factor. An analysis of learning behaviour of the subjects in the experiment revealed that feedback mode influences learning behaviour: subjects with visual feedback tend to practise more intensively than subjects with auditory feedback.Future research will concentrate on various factors related to intonation learning and the effectiveness of visual feedback, such as the role of age, mothertongue and degree of fluency in the second language.

This paper discusses some of the results of an investigation into pronunciation preference among two groups of first-year students of English in the Netherlands. Our aim was to establish in how far RP, the accent that is used almost universally in Dutch secondary and tertiary education, appeals to these learners as a pronunciation model as compared with a number of other English accents (General American, Cockney, Yorkshire General Australian, Scots English and 'near-native Dutch RP'). The inves-tigation was prompted by the suspicion that the presence of a large number of American features in the English accent of beginning first-year students of English might be an indication of the popularity of an American style accent among these students. The test consisted of seven versions of an animal fable, read by seven different speakers, illustrating the seven accents. Students were asked to score these accents for appeal on a five-point scale. The scores revealed that, contrary to our expectations, the RP version was rated significantly higher than the American version. This may, however, have been due to the rather staid, middle generation character of the accent involved. Scots, Yorkshire, Gen Australian and Cockney appeared to have very little appeal, while the 'Dutch RP' version had roughly the same appeal as the American accent. Apart from this general trend, the appeal-scores showed interesting differences for the various subgroups. It was also attempted to establish to what attributes of the seven accents the preference scores could be related. It appeared that two factors, social status and personal attractiveness, correlated highly with the preference scores. Future research will be aimed at developing scales which will more accurately determine to what attributes preference is related. It will also be attempted to establish the 'covert' as opposed 'overt' prestige of certain English accents for Dutch learners.

The article contains a synthesis of the locution R+0+ teaching|English|pronunciation|| F++0- can be|a sheer|waste|of time|||Such a synthesis is an output of a system of generative phonetic rules, covering both features of timing and of articulation. The rules operate on phonological outputs: transcriptions. In the example, the transcription and the constants were typed in beforehand, the variables then had to be filled in by hand. Students of English at Amsterdam University are regular-ly given such assignments in order to develop their theoretical knowledge of English pronunciation.The synthesis is explained in some detail. The main points that emerge are that the approach is parametric not segmental, functional not real-izational (i.e. from phonetics to phonology, not vice versa), exhaustive not eclectic, specific not differentiating, and articulatory not acoustic. As stated, it rests on the mechanical application of generative rules.Some account is given of the use made of the theory in practical pronun-ciation teaching. The rules themselves could not all be given within the scope of the article: only those for phonation are stated in full, for purposes of illustration. In conclusion, their operation in a short text is then dealt with from the point of view of the Dutch student of English.

In an attempt to develop a standardized instrument to measure subjective voice and pronunciation quality a sample op 35 bipolar seven-point scales was selected and tested for reliability among raters by a preliminary pencil-and-paper investigation.Different groups of subjects were asked to rate the ideal male voice, the ideal female voice, and their own voice on each of the 35 items. The contribution of different subject factors to the variance in the ratings of each concept on each scale separately was established. One of those factors was sex of the rater.For practical reasons, we want this nascent instrument to be equally applicable for male and female speakers. We therefore studied the differences between mean ratings for ideal male speaker and ideal female speaker on each of the scales as well.The results show (1) many significant differences between perceived ideal male and ideal female voice, which qualitatively are rather inde-pendent of the sex of the informant; quantitatively female raters show a tendency to make smaller differences between male and female ideal speaker on the rating scales; (2) male and female raters often differ significantly in their judgment of ideal male voice alone or of ideal female voice alone; where this is the case, the mean judgment of the female raters practically always stands on a more 'extreme' point of the rating scale; (3) male and female raters often differ significantly in the ratings of their own voice; in general, the differences between own voice ratings by males and females on the 35 rating scales are qualitatively the same as those between ratings of male and female ideal voice respectively.These results were compared with Kramer's (1977) study on perceptions of (typical) male and female speech. It is concluded that the same stereo-types play a part in our subject's ideal and self ratings as in the 'typical speech' ratings of Kramer's subjects.

The article contains some preliminary data of a contrastive study of prosodic phenomena in Dutch and French, and some ideas about implementa-tion of findings in the teaching of French to Dutch learners. First the durational aspects are considered of Dutch as a "stress-timed" language and of French as a "syllable-timed" language.To study the phenomena of "compression" and "reduction" some comparisons are made between the length of unaccented syllables in Dutch and French cognate words.In the second part some intonation contours are compared for words as described by Vaissière for French and by Cohen, 't Hart and Collier for Dutch. Finally some suggestions are made about possible applications to the teaching of French to Dutch learners.

This paper reports an experiment examining the amount of auditory stimulus information needed by native and non-native listeners in order to achieve correct recognition of spoken words. The words used are all polysyllabic and of a high frequency of occurrence. The words were presented in ever-increasing word fragments, the first of each word presenting the word onset, the last presenting the complete word.Variability between twenty native subjects in the number of fragments per word needed for correct recognition was small. Non-native subjects needed systematically more fragments and showed a greater variability. The results suggest that the present method can in principle be used to examine the skill of each second language learner in recognizing spoken words from fragmentary information. Combined with other tests, specifically directed at other aspects of listening proficiency such as vocabulary size, and the efficient use of syntactic, semantic and extra-linguistic knowledge, these tests can be used to spot specific deficiencies in listening proficiency.

In spite of a mutual desire for closer relations, it has to be concluded that modern experimental phonetics has little to offer to the pronunciation teacher, apart from a number of technical appliances. Pronunciation teaching is only concerned with what can be heard with the naked ear and therefore does not need experimental support.

This paper presents a description of a plan of research on the pronun-ciation of international words by Dutch-speaking advanced learners of German as a foreign language. Pronunciation teachers have often found learners, even those who have a good 'overall' accent, to have problems with the pronunciation of international words. In order to effect more efficient learning and Leaching of the pronunciation of these words a research design is proposed which consists of (1) an inventory of the international words in German and Dutch, combined with a contrastive description of the nature and degree of phonetic adaptation, and (2) a study of the nature and size of the problems encountered by the group of Dutch learners mentioned above, based on an analysis of utterances elicited by means of various tests.