Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

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Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityPhonetic correlates of unintelligibility in VietnameseaccentedEnglishUna CunninghamSchool of Arts and Media, Dalarna University, FalunAbstractVietnamese speakers of English are often ableto communicate much more efficiently in writingthan in speaking. Many have quite highproficiency levels, with full command of advancedvocabulary and complex syntax, yetthey have great difficulty making themselvesunderstood when speaking English to both nativeand non-native speakers. This paper exploresthe phonetic events associated withbreakdowns in intelligibility, and looks at compensatorymechanisms which are used.IntelligibilityThe scientific study of intelligibility has passedthrough a number of phases. Two strands thathave shifted in their relative prominence are thematter of to whom non-native speakers are tobe intelligible. In one strand the emphasis is onthe intelligibility of non-native speakers to nativeEnglish-speaking listeners (Flege, Munro etal. 1995; Munro and Derwing 1995; Tajima,Port et al. 1997). This was the context in whichEnglish was taught and learned – the majorityof these studies have been carried out in whatare known as inner circle countries, which, inturn, reflects the anglocentricism which hascharacterised much of linguistics. The otherstrand focuses on the position of English as alanguage of international communication,where intelligibility is a two-way affair betweena native or non-native English-speaking speakerand a native or non-native English-speakinglistener (Irvine 1977; Flege, MacKay et al.1999; Kirkpatrick, Deterding et al. 2008; Rooy2009).The current study is a part of a larger studyof how native speakers of American English,Swedish, Vietnamese, Urdu and Ibo are perceivedby listeners from these and other languagebackgrounds. Vietnamese-accentedspeech in English has been informally observedto be notably unintelligible for native Englishspeakinglisteners and even for Vietnamese listenersthere is great difficulty in choosingwhich of four words has been uttered (Cunningham2009).There are a number of possible ways inwhich intelligibility can be measured. Listenerscan be asked to transcribe what they hear or tochoose from a number of alternatives. Stimulivary from spontaneous speech through texts tosentences to wordlists. Sentences with varyingdegrees of semantic meaning are often used(Kirkpatrick, Deterding et al. 2008) to controlfor the effect of contextual information on intelligibility.Few intelligibility studies appear to beconcerned with the stimulus material. The questionof what makes an utterance unintelligible isnot addressed in these studies. The current paperis an effort to come some way to examiningthis issue.Learning English in VietnamThe pronunciation of English presents severechallenges to Vietnamese-speaking learners.Not only is the sound system of Vietnamesevery different from that of English, but there arealso extremely limited opportunities for hearingand speaking English in Vietnam. In addition,there are limited resources available to teachersof English in Vietnam so teachers are likely topass on their own English pronunciation to theirstudents.University students of English are introducedto native-speaker models of English pronunciation,notably Southern educated British,but they do not often have the opportunity tospeak with non-Vietnamese speakers of English.Most studies of Vietnamese accents inEnglish have been based in countries whereEnglish is a community language, such as theU.S. (Tang 2007) or Australia (Nguyen 1970;In-gram and Nguyen 2007). This study is thusunusual in considering the English pronunciationof learners who live in Vietnam. Thespeech material presented here was produced bymembers of a group of female students fromHanoi.Vietnamese accents of EnglishThe most striking feature of VietnameseaccentedEnglish is the elision of consonants, inparticular in the syllable coda. This can obvi-108
Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universityously be related to the phonotactic constraintsoperational in Vietnamese, and it is clearly aproblem when speaking English which places aheavy semantic load on the coda in verb formsand other suffixes. Consonant clusters are generallysimplified in Vietnamese-accent Englishto a degree that is not compatible with intelligibility.Even single final consonants are oftenabsent or substituted for by another consonantwhich is permitted in the coda in Vietnamese.Other difficulties in the intelligibility ofVietnamese-accented English are centred invowel quality. English has a typologically relativelyrich vowel inventory, and this createsproblems for learners with many L1s, includingVietnamese. The distinction between the vowelsof KIT and FLEECE to use the word classterminology developed by John Wells (Wells1982) or ship and sheep to allude to the popularpronunciation teaching textbook (Baker 2006)is particularly problematic.Other problematic vowel contrasts are thatbetween NURSE and THOUGHT (e.g. work vswalk) and between TRAP AND DRESS (e.g.bag vs beg). The failure to perceive or producethese vowel distinctions is a major hinder to theintelligibility of Vietnamese-accented English.Vowel length is not linguistically significantin Vietnamese and the failure to notice or producepre-fortis clipping is another source of unintelligibility.Another interesting effect that isattributable to transfer from Vietnamese is theuse in English of the rising sac tone on syllablesthat have a voiceless stop in the coda. Thiscan result in a pitch prominence that may beinterpreted as stress by listeners.Vietnamese words are said to be generallymonosyllabic, and are certainly written asmonosyllables with a space between each syllable.This impression is augmented (or possiblyexplained) by the apparent paucity of connectedspeech phenomena in Vietnamese and consequentlyin Vietnamese-accented English.AnalysisA number of features of Vietnamese-accentedEnglish will be analysed here. They are a) thevowel quality distinction between the wordssheep and ship, b) the vowel duration distinctionbetween seat and seed, and c) the causes ofglobal unintelligibility in semantically meaningfulsentences taken from an earlier study(Munro and Derwing 1995).Vowel qualityThe semantic load of the distinction betweenthe KIT and FLEECE vowels is significant.This opposition seems to be observed in mostvarieties of English, and it is one that has beenidentified as essential for learners of English tomaster (Jenkins 2002). Nonetheless, this distinctionis not very frequent in the languages ofthe world. Consequently, like any kind of newdistinction, a degree of effort and practice isrequired before learners with many first languages,including Vietnamese, can reliably perceiveand produce this distinction.Figure 1. F1 vs F2 in Bark for S15 for the wordsbead, beat, bid, bit.Fig.1 shows the relationship between F1 andF2 in Bark for the vowels in the words beat,bead, bit and bid for S15, a speaker of Vietnamese(a 3 rd year undergraduate English majorstudent at a university in Hanoi). This speakerdoes not make a clear spectral distinction betweenthe vowels. As spectral quality is themost salient cue to this distinction for nativespeakers of English (Ladefoged 2006; Cruttenden2008), the failure to make a distinction isobviously a hinder to intelligibility.Vowel durationEnhanced pre-fortis clipping is used in manyvarieties of English as a primary cue to postvocalicvoicelessness (Ladefoged 2006; Cruttenden2008). It has been well documented thatphonologically voiced (lenis) post-vocalic consonantsare often devoiced by native speakersof many varieties of English (e.g. Cruttenden2008). This means that in word sets such asbead, beat, bid, bit native speakers will signalpostvocalic voicing primarily by shortening theprevocalic vowel in beat and bit. In addition,native speakers will have a secondary durationalcue to the bead, beat vs bid, bit voweldistinction where the former vowel is system-109
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