Best practices in measuring vowel merger

Nycz, Jennifer; Hall‐Lew, Lauren

doi:10.1121/1.4894063

Cited by 52 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Factors included were, in order: F unc C ont , P rec P lace , P rec M anner , F ol P lace , F ol M anner , L exical_set ( trap versus bath ). Note that these factors, and the dataset itself, differ from those profiled in Nycz and Hall-Lew (2014), which explains the difference between the results shown here and those in that paper.…”

Section: Notescontrasting

confidence: 94%

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Accommodation or political identity: Scottish members of the UK Parliament

2017

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Section: Notescontrasting

confidence: 94%

“…Factors included were, in order: FUNCCONT, PRECPLACE, PRECMANNER, FOLPLACE, FOLMANNER, LEXICAL_SET (TRAP versus BATH). Note that these factors, and the dataset itself, differ from those profiled in Nycz and Hall-Lew (2014), which explains the difference between the results shown and those in in that paper. …”

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 55%

Accommodation or political identity: Scottish members of the UK Parliament

2017

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“…A Pillai score of 1 indicates a complete separation of vowel categories, while a score of 0 indicates complete overlap. This metric has been proposed in sociophonetics as a more powerful alternative to acoustic distances (Nycz and Hall-Lew, 2013) for measuring vowel mergers and splits (Hay, Warren and Drager, 2006; Hall-Lew, 2010), and has recently been proposed as a metric of L2 pronunciation by Mairano et al (2019). Our assumption is that speakers who have developed phonological categories for front rounded vowels show less overlap with competing phonemes (IT3) than learners who have not developed such phonological categories (IT22), as shown in Figure 1 and Table 2.…”

Section: Measuring L2 Vocabulary Size and L2 Pronunciation: Methods Amentioning

confidence: 99%

What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners

Mairano¹,

Santiago²

2020

French Language Studies

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Measures of second language (L2) learners’ vocabulary size have been shown to correlate with language proficiency in reading, writing and listening skills, and vocabulary tests are sometimes used for placement purposes. However, the relation between learners’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking skills has been less thoroughly investigated, and even less so in terms of pronunciation. In this article, we compare vocabulary and pronunciation measures for 25 Italian instructed learners of L2 French. We measure their receptive (Dialang score) and productive (vocd-D, MTLD) vocabulary size, and calculate the following pronunciation indices: acoustic distance and overlap of realizations for selected L2 French vowel pairs, ratings of nasality for ratings of foreign-accentedness, fluency metrics. We find that vocabulary measures show low to medium correlations with fluency metrics and ratings of foreign-accentedness, but not with vowel metrics. We then turn our attention to the impact of research methods on the study of vocabulary and pronunciation. More specifically, we discuss the possibility that these results are due to pitfalls in vocabulary and pronunciation indices, such as the failure of Dialang to take into account the effect of L1-L2 cognates, and the lack of measures for evaluating consonants, intonation and perception skills.

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“…To facilitate this, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used (F1 and F2 as dependent variables), as it allows us to test hypotheses regarding the effect of one or more independent variables on two or more dependent variables. The output from MANOVA includes a number of summary statistical tests, one of which is Pillai’s Trace, or Pillai score (Hay et al, 2006; Kelley & Tucker, 2020; Nycz & Hall-Lew, 2013). The Pillai score describes the separability of two distributions as well as variation within each distribution.…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Spanish speakers’ English schwar production: Does orthography play a role?

Shea

2021

Applied Psycholinguistics

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This study examines how input mode – whether written or auditory – interacts with orthography in the production of North American English (NAE) schwar (/ɝ/, found in fur, heard, bird) by native Spanish speakers. Greater orthographic interference was predicted for written input, given the obligatory activation of orthographic representations in the execution of the task. Participants were L1 Mexican Spanish/L2 English speakers (L2, n = 15) and NAE (n = 15, rhotic dialect speakers). The target items were 10 schwar words and 10 words matched in graphemes to the onset and nucleus of the schwar words (e.g., bird was matched with big), for a total of 20 items. The degree of overlap between schwar productions across group and input mode (L2 only) was analyzed, followed by a generalized additive mixed model analysis of F3, one of the acoustic cues to rhotacization. Results showed that L2 schwar productions were different from the NAE productions in both the overlap and F3 measures, and the written input mode showed greater L1 orthographic interference than the auditory input mode, supporting the hypothesis that L1 orthography–phonology correspondences affect L2 productions of English schwar words.

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Best practices in measuring vowel merger

Cited by 52 publications

References 6 publications

Accommodation or political identity: Scottish members of the UK Parliament

Accommodation or political identity: Scottish members of the UK Parliament

What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners

Spanish speakers’ English schwar production: Does orthography play a role?

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