An acoustic analysis of English vowels produced by speakers of seven different native-language backgrounds
- Editor(s):
- Wieling, M.; Kroon, M.; Noort, G. van; Bouma, G.
Abstract
We measured F1, F2 and
duration of ten English monophthongs produced by American native speakers and
by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian and Chinese L2 speakers. We
hypothesized that (i) L2 speakers would approximate the English vowels more closely as the phonological distance between the L2 and English is smaller, and (ii) English vowels of L2 speaker groups will be more similar as the L2s are closer to one another. Comparison of acoustic vowel diagrams and Linear Discriminant Analyses (LDA) confirm the hypotheses, with one exception: Dutch speakers deviate more from L1 English than the Scandinavian groups. The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit was convincingly simulated by the LDA.
Foreign accentvowel systemacoustic analysisvowel formantsvowel durationLinear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)(Relative) Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (R-ISIB)second-language acquisition (SLA)English as Lingua Franca (ELF)
