Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

The Impact of Applied Linguistics: Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of BAAL
University of the West of England
L1/Level German Spanish Korean
A2 x 2 x
B1 2 2 2
B2 2 2 2
C1 x 2 x
Table 12.1: Dataset
The participants represent ‘average’ learners at each level and were
selected from video-recorded benchmarked speaking test performances
used for examiner training. The elicitation tasks included description of a
visual task (at B1-C1) and an information gap task (at A2). A 60-second
speech sample per participant was analysed for this pilot study. This paper
will present the preliminary findings for the 8 L1 Spanish learners of
English.
Method
The pronunciation measures under investigation were selected to be crosslinguistically
valid and included:
1. A set of systemic properties that differ cross-linguistically:
a. Sound segments and syllable structures:
English has richer and more complex inventories of sound
segments and syllable structures than most other languages
including Spanish.
b. Sentence stress (accentuation) and boundary marking:
Both the placement and the realisation of these vary between
languages.
2. A set of rhythm metrics which reflect cross-linguistic differences in
timing:
Languages have different characteristic rhythms, traditionally
referred to as ‘stress timing’ and ‘syllable timing’ (Pike 1945,
Abercrombie 1967) due to differences in their phonological
properties, such as syllable structure (Roach 1982, Dauer 1983,
1987), and also to prosodic properties like accentuation and
boundary marking (Prieto et al., in press). A number of metrics
have been developed to quantify these rhythmic differences, and
they have been successfully applied in research on child speech,
clinical speech, and L2 speech (White and Mattys 2007, Payne et al.
in press). In this study, the rhythm metrics V% (the proportion of
vocalic intervals in the utterance), Varco-V and Varco-C
(variability in vocalic/consonantal interval duration), and nPVI-C
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