Journal of Second Language Pronunciation - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2025

Despite growing interest in the role of prosody in communication, there is still a need for more empirical research to better understand its impact on listeners’ understanding and to provide effective pronunciation instruction. The study compares the effectiveness of two methods (i.e., embodied and computer-assisted techniques) in training Japanese vowel length contrast and pitch accent, with the aim of improving L2 perception and production, and ultimately increasing intelligibility and comprehensibility. Training was provided to English-speaking learners of Japanese for four weeks. Following the training, learners exhibited significant improvement in their overall performance, and these observed improvements often continued until the delayed posttest. Furthermore, there were no significant differences in performance between learners assigned to embodied techniques and those using computer-assisted methods. These findings suggest that both methods may be equally effective and that L2 prosody can improve in as short as four weeks with targeted instruction.

Previous research revealed that Hindi speakers identify American English (AE) phonemes /v/ and /w/ with only chance accuracy. Building on these findings, this study explored the production of AE /v/ and /w/ by Hindi speakers, utilizing both acoustic analysis of second formant (F2) onset and AE listeners’ ratings. Participants included two groups of Hindi-English bilinguals, one residing in the US for more than 5 years, one residing in India, and a group of monolingual AE speakers. Results indicated significant differences in F2 onset between AE speakers and Hindi groups, with AE speakers differentiating the consonants more than the Hindi speakers did. The F2 onset of the Hindi speakers who had resided in the US differed from the F2 onsets produced by those with no AE immersion experience in certain conditions only. AE listeners rated only a few productions from Hindi speakers as accurate representations of AE /v/ and /w/. AE /v/-/w/ is difficult for Hindi speakers to produce contrastively, even for those who have resided in the US for several years.

Given that second language pronunciation errors are typically variable, learners would benefit from feedback that both flags errors (corrective feedback) and confirms correct pronunciation (confirmative feedback). We investigated Google Translate (GT) automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcription accuracy to determine its capacity to provide such feedback, based on Quebec francophone recordings of correctly/incorrectly realized English th-initial, h-initial and vowel-initial items in predictable/unpredictable sentence contexts. Recordings from male and female speakers were used to verify possible gender bias. In predictable contexts, transcription accuracy rates were higher for correct vs incorrect pronunciations; rates in unpredictable contexts for correct or incorrect pronunciations fell midway between the two. GT ASR is thus better at providing confirmative feedback in predictable contexts but corrective feedback in unpredictable contexts. Regardless of context, accuracy was considerably higher on errors leading to real-word than nonword output. Contra the anticipated pattern, female speakers were transcribed with higher accuracy than male.

This study investigated the effects of task complexity on the linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency in L2 Japanese. 36 Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese performed two argumentative speech tasks with differing levels of complexity. These audio samples were judged by eight experienced native raters of Japanese for comprehensibility and perceived fluency and then analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The results showed that linguistic correlates of comprehensibility exhibit a task-specific effect, with additional linguistic dimensions (e.g., syntactic density, explicit grammatical marking) becoming increasingly relevant as task complexity rises. In contrast, perceived fluency also undergoes a task-specific shift but differently: rather than expanding the set of predictors, it changes the nature of primary cues, placing greater emphasis on syntactic sophistication alongside (but not replacing) temporal aspects. Findings underscore the unique role of Japanese linguistic system in shaping listeners’ judgments of L2 Japanese.

This study investigates the intelligibility and comprehensibility of French-accented speech in an academic context. L1 French and L1 English listeners heard speech samples in three different accent conditions: a marked French accent, an unmarked French accent and a Southern British English (SBE) accent. They were asked to perform two word recognition tasks, a speech comprehension task and provided subjective ratings of certainty, comprehensibility, cognitive load and accentedness. Results showed that for English listeners sharing the same first language (L1) had a facilitating effect, whereas varying the levels of French-accentedness had a detrimental effect. French listeners, however, did not find French-accented speech significantly more intelligible and comprehensible than SBE-accented speech. These findings deepen our knowledge of the relationship between intelligibility, comprehensibility, accentedness and cognitive load.