Production Accuracy of L2 Vowels: Phonological Parsimony and Phonetic Flexibility

Abstract

Ultimate attainment in foreign-language sound learning is addressed via vowel production accuracy in English spoken by advanced Czech EFL learners. English FLEECE-KIT, DRESS-TRAP, and GOOSE-FOOT contrasts are examined in terms of length, height, and backness. Our data show that, while being constrained by phonemic category assimilation (new vowel height distinctions are not created), the learners' interlanguage combines phonological parsimony (reusing L1 length feature to contrast L2 vowels) with phonetic flexibility (within-category shifts reflecting L1-L2 phonetic dissimilarity). Although achieving nativelike phonological competence may not be possible learners who acquire L2 in the prevailingly L1 environment, the Czech learners' implementations of English vowels revealed their ability to adjust for phonetic detail of L2 sounds. Keywords:English as a foreign language, L2 phonology, ultimate attainment, vowels 1 AOL stands for the Age of Learning, i.e. age at the onset of acquisition. The most frequently cited AOL studies include e.g.

Phonetic aspects of strongly-accented Czech speakers of English

“…Šimáčková found that Czech learners rely predominantly on duration when deciding between the English /ae/ and /e/, and that their production of the two vowels spectrally overlap. Similar results were obtained by Šimáčková and Podlipský (2018): even highly proficient Czech speakers of English used duration to contrast the two vowels, with vowel height being less reliable. Šturm and Skarnitzl (2011) studied perceptual aspects of the vowel /ae/ by two groups of listeners: students who had been instructed in the phonetics and phonology of English and naïve students with no such formal instruction.…”

Vowel Perception and Transcription Trainer for Learners of English as a Foreign Language

“…However, the same production data showed that /ae/ and /ɛ/ are easily confused in these EFL learners' speech, and that compared to the other English monophthongs, both /ae/ and /ɛ/ display increased within-speaker variation, as well as substitutions between each other in pronunciation of individual lexical items. In Šimáčková and Podlipský (2018), learners' productions of /ae/ showed little lowering or retraction as compared with /ɛ/. In this respect, the production data do not match the current vowel identification data elicited in Pilot 1.…”

“…The logistic regression model also allows us to assess how accurately the learners identified each of the eleven vowel categories. Identification accuracy of the individual vowel monophthongs was measured against the KIT vowel as the reference category, since it was earlier shown that /ɪ/ is the most accurately produced English vowel in speech of Czech EFL learners (Šimáčková and Podlipský 2018), and also since it had the highest identification accuracy in the present results: as seen in Table 2, all other vowel categories had significantly lower likelihood of correct answers. In Table 2 the vowel categories are ordered from those with the greatest negative difference from KIT (the vowel TRAP) to the lowest (the vowel FLEECE).…”

“…The degree of foreign-accentedness varies across these learners. In an earlier accent-rating study conducted with a different but equivalent learner population, 18 undergraduate English majors at Palacký University were judged by English native listeners, American mid-west college students, on a nine-point Likert scale where 1 was a strong foreign accent and 9 was native-like pronunciation (Šimáčková and Podlipský 2016). The mean accentedness scores in that study ranged between 2.3 and 6.2.…”

“…The poor performance on the vowel /ae/ was expected. The relatively high proportion of correct responses for its predicted competitor, /ɛ/, may reflect the phonetic similarity of the English lax /ɛ/ to the Czech short /ɛ/ and its identification accuracy parallels more accurate pronunciation of /ɛ/ compared to /ae/ in productions of EFL learners from the same learner population (Šimáčková and Podlipský 2018). However, the same production data showed that /ae/ and /ɛ/ are easily confused in these EFL learners' speech, and that compared to the other English monophthongs, both /ae/ and /ɛ/ display increased within-speaker variation, as well as substitutions between each other in pronunciation of individual lexical items.…”