Phonetic aspects of strongly-accented Czech speakers of English

Abstract

This paper contributes to the study of Czech-accented English by examining multiple pronunciation features, both segmental and prosodic, typically associated with or previously studied in Czech English. We analyzed ten female speakers who had been evaluated as having a strong accent in their English, using auditory and acoustic approaches. In the segmental domain, most of the analyzed speakers used Czech equivalents of the English open vowels /ae ɒ/ and tended to pronounce a velar plosive after a velar nasal. In the domain of connected speech, linking was very rare in our speakers, and their pitch range tended to be very flat. The results underscore the fact that the label "strong Czech accent" may, in different speakers, refer to different constellations of pronunciation features.

Glottalization and linking in the L2 speech of Czech learners of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

“…Bissiri and Volín (2010) compared speakers with a strong Czech accent in English with native speakers of British English. They found that glottalization occurred in more than 75% of the possible instances in Czech English (see similar results by Skarnitzl and Rumlová, 2019), while the native speakers glottalized in about 30% of possible contexts. The latter value corresponds to the degree of glottalization reported by Dilley et al (1996) for speakers of American English.…”

“…Another interesting question is related to the type of linking context. In their study of Czech learners of English, Skarnitzl and Rumlová (2019) did not report different tendencies to link in hiatus (V#V) and resyllabification (C#V) contexts; a more detailed analysis of their data reveals essentially no difference between the two contexts. However, Šimáčková et al (2014) did find different tendencies in their more proficient speakers, with slightly more linking in resyllabification than in hiatus contexts, particularly at faster speech rates.…”

“…For each L2, we will examine two speaker groups: more and less experienced learners (see Section II.2). The hypothesis related to this variable (Hypothesis 1) is intuitively straightforward, and may further be based on the comparison between the results reported for more-accented (Skarnitzl and Rumlová, 2019) and less-accented (Šimáčková et al, 2014) Czech speakers of English (see Section I.1). 1 At the same time, there is no a priori reason to predict differences between Czech learners of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, since standard varieties are expected to be taught at schools and, with the relatively marginal exception of Italian (see Section I.4), glottalization is absent in those.…”

Diffusion of Phonetic Updates within Phonological Neighborhoods

“…Word-initial plosive aspiration, being a feature of the majority of English varieties (e.g., Watt and Yurkova 2007;Berry and Moyle 2011;Docherty et al 2011;Chodroff et al 2015;Sonderegger 2015;Morris 2018), can represent a phonetic challenge for learners of English whose first language is non-aspirating, such as Austrian German and Czech (Moosmüller, Schmid, and Brandstätter 2015;Skarnitzl and Rumlová 2019). From an articulatory viewpoint, aspiration is the period between an initial burst of frication and the start of voicing (Klatt 1975;Abramson and Whalen 2017), which is commonly measured as voice-onset time (or VOT).…”

“…The lack of aspiration in word-initial plosives in Austrian and Czech learners of English results in the typical low-aspirated foreign language (L2) English varieties encountered in speakers from Austria and the Czech Republic. This is especially prominent in learners at lower and medium proficiency stages, but may persist even in highly proficient learners of English (Pospíšilová 2011;Ambrožová 2014;Skarnitzl and Rumlová 2019;Kong-Insam 2021).…”