Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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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 68
Measuring L2 English Phonological Proficiency: Implications for Language Assessment Evelina Galaczi, Brechtje Post, Aike Li and Calbert Graham (variability in the duration of consonantal intervals, normalised for speaking rate) were used. The analysis was carried out with the speech processing software Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2010). An example of the segmental and prosodic labelling is given in Figure 12.1. Figure 12.1: Praat segmental and prosodic labelling: an example The first tier contains orthographic transcription. The second tier marks each syllable as unaccented (s), accented (sa), phrase-final (sef), accented/phrase-final (saef), or hesitated (sx). In the third tier, each vowel and consonant was segmented primarily by visual inspection of speech waveforms and wideband spectrograms. This procedure was carried out with reference to standard criteria (e.g. Peterson & Lehiste 1960). The fourth tier contains the phrasing information, i.e. beginning and end of an intonational phrase. Three annotators worked on the segmental and prosodic labelling of the data, achieving an inter-coder agreement of 97%. 69
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