PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

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Chapter 6. Other Potential Applications 153 The second production study involved the pronunciation of anglicisms in German and English carrier sentences in order to test whether language context affects the substitution rate of English xenophones by subjects with excellent English language skills. While they substituted 61.9% of English xenophones in anglicisms embedded in German carrier sentences, they only substituted 31.5% when the same anglicisms appeared in English sentences. Therefore, anglicisms are nativised in German context even when the speakers’ knowledge of English is advanced which means that some degree of nativisation is independent of the foreign language skills of the speaker. Abresch (2007) concludes with a perception study to test whether the information learnt in the first production study corresponds to listeners’ preference. 50 subjects aged between 16 and 75 and with different English language skills participated in this test. They were asked to listen to German sentences with embedded anglicisms and English names that contained the same English xenophones investigated in the first production experiment or corresponding substitutions produced by the subjects. Sub- jects then had to rate the variations of each sentence according to preference. Abresch determined that some English xenophones are clearly preferred over their German substitutions. With few exceptions, this group largely coincides with the xenophones that were also more often rendered closely to their original in the production study. Even subjects with no or little knowledge of English preferred certain xenophones over Ger- man substitutions. No significant difference was found in the preference of xenophones over substitutions in anglicisms and proper names. Abresch also shows that British renderings of English xenophones are mostly preferred over American ones. While it is not possible to draw cross-linguistic conclusions of how anglicisms and English proper names are pronounced in other languages per se, the latter studies clearly show that their pronunciation patterns vary from those of both the receiver and donor languages. Further insight into this issue can be gained by examining studies in the area of SLA. 6.1.1.2 Foreign Speech Sounds in Second Language Acquisition The problem of how speakers of a native language (L1) perceive and produce sounds in a foreign language (L2) is central to the research of SLA. This field differentiates between identical, similar and new L2 sounds when drawing conclusions with regard to their pronunciation in L1. An identical L2 sound is represented by the same IPA
Chapter 6. Other Potential Applications 154 symbol used to represent a sound in L1 and there is no significant acoustic difference between the sound pair. A similar L2 sound is represented by the same IPA symbol as an L1 sound, even though statistical analyses reveal significant acoustic differences between the two. A new L2 sound differs acoustically and perceptually from the sounds in L1 that most closely resemble it. Unlike a similar sound, a new sound is represented by an IPA symbol that is not used for L1 sounds (Flege, 1997). For example, Flege (1987) argues that language learners place an L2 sound that is identical or sufficiently similar to an L1 sound in the same phonetic category, a cog- nitive mechanism called equivalence class. This process prevents adult learners from forming a new category for such L2 sounds and results in an accented pronunciation even after a lengthy exposure to L2. Evidence for this theory was found by Bohn and Flege (1992) for the English vowels℄andÁ℄(e.g. in the words beat and bit) when pronounced by German native speakers with varying degrees of English language experience. Bohn and Flege conclude that this behaviour can be interpreted according to the general principle of least effort. Although experienced and inexperienced speakers largely retain properties of the German℄andÁ℄in their English pronunciations, Flege’s listening experiment shows that they are as highly intelligible to English native listeners as the English℄andÁ℄produced by English native speakers. Flege therefore suggests that phonetic learning of similar sounds takes place during early L2 exposure and does not improve considerably when gaining more L2 experience. Flege and colleagues have also carried out extensive research on the production and perception of L2 sounds that lack a similar sound in L1, in other words new sounds or xenophones. According to their theory, adult learners will produce new L2 sounds more authentically (than similar L2 sounds) with extended L2 exposure as they estab- lish new phonetic categories for such sounds. Bohn and Flege (1992) demonstrated that experienced but not inexperienced German learners of English produce the En- glish℄(e.g. in bat) close enough to the English acoustic form, a sound that has no counterpart in German. Flege further indicates that a similar L2 sound which is in close proximity to new a L2 sound (for which the inexperienced foreign language learner has not yet established a phonetic category) in the acoustic vowel space will be produced closer to the acoustic norm of L2. However, once learners are able to produce an acoustic contrast between the similar and the neighbouring new sound, they tend to produce the similar sound with the acoustic characteristics of L1. Flege has identified
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A.2.2 Kappa Coefficient . . . . . .
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Bibliography 204 Finkel, J., Dingar
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Bibliography 206 Hachey, B., Alex,
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Bibliography 208 Kirkness, A. (1984
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Bibliography 212 Poplack, S. (1988)
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Bibliography 214 Sokol, D. K. (2000
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Bibliography 216 Yang, W. (1990). A
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PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

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