Article

Visual Feedback and Relative Vowel Duration in L2 Pronunciation: The Curious Case of Stressed and Unstressed Vowels

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Abstract

Visual feedback for pronunciation training consists of providing learners with visual representations of their own productions and facilitating comparison with a native speaker model. While visual feedback has been shown to be successful in training some absolute duration-based consonantal cues (e.g., voice onset time), the current study examines whether visual feedback may improve relative durational contrasts (e.g., stressed vs unstressed vowels). Using a pretest, intervention, and posttest design, intermediate-level English-speaking learners of Spanish completed a visual feedback paradigm focused on relative vowel duration. In English, stressed vowels are significantly longer than unstressed vowels (i.e., twice as long). In Spanish, stressed vowels are only marginally longer than unstressed vowels. The intervention consisted of three activities in which participants read aloud and recorded utterances containing target words and compared their spectrograms/waveforms with those produced by native speakers. Target tokens were controlled for phonetic environment, syllable structure, and cognate status. Contrary to original hypotheses, results showed that at the pretest, learners produced shorter stressed vowels and longer unstressed vowels, a pattern not observed in either English or Spanish. Furthermore, no change was found following the visual feedback paradigm. The results are discussed with reference to cognitive load and methodological trade-offs between controlled and spontaneous speech.

How to Cite: Olson, D. (2022). Visual feedback and relative vowel duration in L2 pronunciation: the curious case of stressed and unstressed vowels. In J. Levis & A. Guskaroska (eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, held June 2021 virtually at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.13353