Presentation

An Instrumental Account of the Intelligibility of [_] in Seven Varieties of L2 Englishes

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Abstract

Munro, Flege, and MacKay (1996, p. 328) and Munro and Derwing (2008, p. 493) report the results of perception studies in which they found that [_] was one of the least well perceived vowels by General American English (GAE) hearers of L2 Englishes. Exploratory acoustic phonetic studies conducted on seven varieties of L2 Englishes support their findings in part. Indeed, the vowel [_] in these seven varieties of L2 Englishes overlaps acoustically with or encroaches on [æ] or [_]. As a result, GAE hearers may have a hard time perceiving [_] accurately. However, confusion data from Peterson and Barney (1952) and Hillenbrand et al (1995) also indicate that [_] is among the least well perceived vowels of GAE. It is perceived accurately 92.2% of the time in Peterson and Barney, and 90.8% of the time in Hillenbrand et al. The infelicitous perceptions of [_] may be due to the realignment of vowels in the acoustic vowel space that is going on presently in GAE. As a result, some other vowels are overlapping with the acoustic vowel space of [_]. Small (2005, p. 79) notes, for instance, that many participants in his acoustic phonetic studies confuse [_] and [_]. I contend in this paper that the poor intelligibility of [_] may have as much to do with the dialect(s) of the intelligibility judges as with the acoustic production of the L2 talkers. Furthermore, I contend that researchers can gain greater insights into the intelligibility of vowels if L2 production data is assessed instrumentally and used in tandem with confusion data that is already available for GAE and other accented Englishes. Doing so can help us determine the real sources of the intelligibility problems with L2-accented production of [_].

How to Cite:

Koffi, E., (2013) “An Instrumental Account of the Intelligibility of [_] in Seven Varieties of L2 Englishes”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 5(1).