Author: Publisher: Cuvillier Verlag ISBN: 373691976X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
The purpose of this study is to measure the intelligibility of Cameroon English speech to British and American English speakers and vice versa, and to analyse the major causes of intelligibility failure when speakers of these varieties of English interact. Focus is on segmental and supra-segmental phonology. The study was motivated by a number of concerns: the trepidation nursed by some scholars that the emergence of non-native varieties around the world would cause English to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible varieties in the way Romance languages devolved from their Latin ancestors; the fact that previous studies on intelligibility were centred on the traditional approach which considers non-native varieties of English to be deficient, and not different from native varieties and the debate on the level of phonological analysis that is considered the greatest threat to intelligibility between native and non-native speakers. Five tests were designed for the study, namely Test I (connected speech), Test II (reading passage), Test III (phonemic contrast elicitation), Test IV (nucleus placement in words) and Test V (nucleus placement in sentences)
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The purpose of this work is to measure the degree of intelligibility of native and non-native English speech as well as analyse the major sources of intelligibility failure when speakers of these varieties of English interact. British and American English (henceforth BrE and AmE) and Cameroon English (hereafter CamE) are used as a case study with focus on segmental and supra segmental features. The study was motivated by a number of concerns, several of which are more prominent: First, it was motivated by the trepidation scholars like Gimson (1965, 1980); Prator (1968); etc. nursed that the unprecedented spread of English across the globe and the emergence of non-native varieties would cause English to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible languages, in the way Romance languages devolved from their Latin ancestor. The second motivation was that previous researchers (Bansal 1969, Tiffen 1974) on intelligibility have often concentrated their efforts on the traditional approach, which sees intelligibility from a one-sided perspective. To them, the non-native varieties of English are deficient and not different varieties from the native varieties. They were seen as substandard, incorrect, and unintelligible and thus needed remediation at all costs. The native varieties were seen as prestigious, correct, intelligible and the sole norm that must be emulated by non-native English speakers. In this way any interaction between a native speaker and a non-native speaker should be characterised by the non-native speaker making all the efforts to be understood as well as to understand the native English-speaking partner. This explains in large part why these researchers concentrated on measuring the intelligibility of non-native speech to native speakers and never vice versa. It was as if it was treasonable to measure the intelligibility of native speech to non-native speakers. Even if some researchers managed to do this, the comments that followed such data still showed tha.
Author: John M. Levis Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108416624 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
An intelligibility-based approach to teaching that presents pronunciation as critical, yet neglected, in communicative language teaching.
Author: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9783642443893 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Second language phonology is approached in this book from the perspective of data-based studies into the English sound system as used by native and non-native speakers of the language. The book offers a unique combination of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and pedagogical approaches, with individual contributions investigating the effect of selected conditioning factors on the pronunciation of English. With all the richness of approaches, it is a strong phonetic background that unifies individual contributions to the volume. Thus, the book contains a large body of original, primary research which will be of interest to experienced scientist, practitioners and lecturers as well as graduate students planning to embark on empirical methods of investigating the nature of the sound system
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 7
Book Description
The intelligibility of speech is known to be lower if the talker is non-native instead of native for the given language. This study is aimed at quantifying the overall degradation due to acoustic-phonetic limitations of non- native talkers of Dutch, specifically of Dutch-speaking Americans who have lived in the Netherlands 1-3 years. Experiments were performed using phoneme intelligibility and sentence intelligibility tests, using additive noise as a means of degrading the intelligibility of speech utterances for test purposes. The overall difference in sentence intelligibility between native Dutch talkers and American talkers of Dutch, using native Dutch listeners, was found to correspond to a difference in speech-to-noise ratio of approximately 3 dB. The main contribution to the degradation of speech intelligibility by introducing non-native talkers and/or listeners, is by confusion of vowels, especially those that do not occur in American English.
Author: Radek Skarnitzl Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527512967 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
This book focuses on an increasingly attractive, yet controversial topic of non-native accentedness in speech. The contributors here are aware of the fact that the mechanisms and effects of pronunciation are far too complex to allow for strong and definite claims of any sort, but present research leading to useful answers to relevant questions. The book contributes to the deeper understanding of many aspects of foreign-accented English with reference to clearly described empirical evidence. The volume brings together fourteen chapters organized into four subdivisions, covering conceptual and perceptual issues, questions of segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation features, and methodological and didactic recommendations. As such, it provides a cross-sectional view of the current phonetic and didactic empirical research into the pronunciation of non-native English.
Author: Alene Moyer Publisher: ISBN: 9781107334717 Category : English language Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
In this fascinating account, Alene Moyer examines the social, psychological, educational and legal ramifications of sounding 'foreign'.
Author: Sandra Götz Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 902720358X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive, perceptive, and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings, selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally, language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics, learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.
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Author: 
Author: John M. Levis
Author: Dian Mayasari Alamsaputra
Author: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak
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Author: Radek Skarnitzl
Author: Akiko Nakata
Author: Alene Moyer
Author: Sandra Götz