Relative salience of suprasegmental features on judgments of L2 comprehensibility and accentedness

Kang, Okim

doi:10.1016/j.system.2010.01.005

Cited by 211 publications

(186 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The accent ratings and the deviance found in each area of pronunciation showed that (1) errors in all areas have a significant influence on the ratings and (2) suprasegmental variables proved to have the strongest influence. Kang (2010) investigated how a range of suprasegmental features independently contributed to listener's judgments of comprehensibility and accentedness. She showed that accent ratings were best predicted by pitch range and word stress measures.…”

Section: Accentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native speakers’ perceptions of fluency and accent in L2 speech

et al. 2014

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Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech on the one hand, and fluency and accent as rated by native raters on the other hand. For 90 speech fragments from Turkish and English L2 learners of Dutch, several acoustic measures of fluency and accent were calculated. In Experiment 1, 20 native speakers of Dutch rated the L2 Dutch samples on fluency. In Experiment 2, 20 different untrained native speakers of Dutch judged the L2 Dutch samples on accentedness. Regression analyses revealed, first, that acoustic measures of fluency were good predictors of fluency ratings. Second, segmental and suprasegmental measures of accent could predict some variance of accent ratings. Third, perceived fluency and perceived accent were only weakly related. In conclusion, this study shows that fluency and perceived foreign accent can be judged as separate constructs. Keywordsforeign accent, L2 specific fluency, native raters, perception of L2 speech, second language learners

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Section: Accentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native speakers’ perceptions of fluency and accent in L2 speech

et al. 2014

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“…As indicated in Kang (2010), "one of the most salient features in NNSs intonation patterns is an overall narrow pitch range" (p. 304). According to Kang and Pickering (2013), NNS speech tends to be somewhat monotonous because of compressed pitch range and a lack of variety in pitch level choices.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Chinese Learners’ English Acoustic-prosodic Patterns on Listeners’ Attitudinal Judgments

Chen¹,

Wang

2016

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“…Among other prosodic features, such as rhythm, intonation and stress, pause is one of the most important features in speech naturalness (Zellner, 1994) and accentedness (Kang, 2010). Previous studies have already emphasized the importance of pause length in L2 evaluation, and there is consensus among the studies that L2 learners produce longer pauses than native L1 speakers, and lower level L2 speakers have longer pauses than their high level counterparts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Trofimovich & Baker (2006), in their ratings of Korean L2 learners of English, pause duration was the most influential cue to accentedness ratings compared to other features including stress timing, peak alignment, speech rate, and pause frequency. Kang (2010) also mentioned the influence of pause duration in fluency judgment. According to her study of 11 international teaching assistants of different nationalities, abnormal boundary pauses within clauses, especially pauses over 0.8 seconds, appeared to be the strongest cue on ratings of high level L2 learners' accentedness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, diverse length of pause that would affect raters' judgments has not been properly examined. This is because most previous studies have directly analyzed data from L2 learners' utterances (e.g., Derwing et al, 2009;Kang, 2010) in which only the already formed pausal patterns of L2 speakers' were investigated. Little consideration could be given to specific pause length parameters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effects of pause in English speaking evaluation

Kim¹,

Jang²

2017

Phonetics and Speech Sciences

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The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of utterance internal pause in English speaking evaluation. To avoid possible confusion with other errors caused by segmental and prosodic inaccuracy, stem utterances with two different length obtained from a native speaker were manipulated to make a set of stimuli tokens through insertion of pauses whose length and position vary. After a total of 90 participants classified into three proficiency groups rated the stimuli, the scored data set was statistically analyzed in terms of the mixed effects model. It was confirmed that predictors such as pause length, pause position and utterance length significantly influence raters' evaluation scores. Especially, a dominating effect was found in such a way that raters gradually deducted scores in accordance with the increase of pause duration. In another experiment, a tree-based statistical learning technique was utilized to check which of the significant predictors played a more influential role than others. The findings in this paper are expected to be practically informative for both the test takers who are preparing for an English speaking test and the raters who desire to develop more objective rubric of speaking evaluation.

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Relative salience of suprasegmental features on judgments of L2 comprehensibility and accentedness

Cited by 211 publications

References 41 publications

Native speakers’ perceptions of fluency and accent in L2 speech

Native speakers’ perceptions of fluency and accent in L2 speech

The Effects of Chinese Learners’ English Acoustic-prosodic Patterns on Listeners’ Attitudinal Judgments

The effects of pause in English speaking evaluation

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