Teaching the pronunciation of sentence final and word boundary stops to French learners of English: distracted imitation versus audio-visual explanations

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Studies on stop unrelease in second language acquisition have hitherto focused on the productions of Slavic learners of English (Šimáčková &amp; Podlipský, 2015) and experiments on Polish learners of English; the latter show the tendency to release stops on a more regular basis depending on the type of stop combinations (Rojczyk et al. 2013). In the present study, we aim to test the efficiency of audio-visual explanations as opposed to distracted imitation in pronunciation teaching amongst French learners of English. While unreleased stops are rather frequent in French and English - especially in plosives clusters (Byrd, 1993; Davidson, 2010), unreleased plosives in final positions are less common in French (Van Dommelen, 1983). During phase 1 of the experiment, three groups of 12 native French learners of English (level A1/A2, B1/B2 and C1/C2) were asked to read idiomatic expressions containing both homogeneous and heterogeneous sequences of voiceless stops straddled between words, namely, in sequences like “that cat” [ðæt˺ kæt˺], and stops at the end of sentences like “I told him to speak” [tə spiːk˺]. In the second phase of the experiment, one half in each group was given a different task. The first group heard recorded versions of phase 1 sentences and before reading them out loud, counted up to five in their L1. Stimuli for imitation contained no release in the contexts under scrutiny. The other half had to watch a video explaining the phenomenon of unreleased stops with a production of phase-two expressions propped up by hand gestures. They were then asked to re-read the sentences given in phase 1. Based on these results the current study makes recommendations about what working environment should be prioritized in pronunciation teaching both in class and online (Kröger et al. 2010), and suggests ways to assess students and visually keep track of their progress.</jats:p>

Hand Gestures Facilitate the Acquisition of Novel Phonemic Contrasts When They Appropriately Mimic Target Phonetic Features

“…This study examined whether observing hand gestures mimicking the aspiration feature of aspirated consonants can facilitate the initial-stage learning of nonnative consonants from two complementary dimensions, namely, the perception of aspirated and unaspirated consonants (which was examined through an identification task) and the production of the aspiration contrasts (which was tested through an imitation task). While previous studies have shown beneficial effects of pitch gestures on the learning of suprasegmental features, such as lexical tones (e.g., Baills et al, 2019) and intonation patterns (Yuan et al, 2019), and also beneficial effects of beat gestures on rhythmic patterns (Gluhareva & Prieto, 2017), more inconsistent results have been found for the role of phonetically based gestures on the learning of L2 segmental phonology (Amand & Touhami, 2016;Hoetjes et al, 2019). Crucially, this study examined whether the appropriateness of the gesture relative to the phonetic features of the aspirated consonants would impact, in any way, the training effect.…”

“…Considering that the hand burst gesture matched the aspiration feature of the plosive only, these results strongly suggest that gestures may enhance the learning of nonnative segments only when they appropriately depict the phonetic information of the target segments. production of released and unreleased stops in English (Amand & Touhami, 2016), as well as the Spanish phoneme /u/ (Hoetjes et al, 2019), this was not the case when the technique was applied to Spanish /θ/ (Hoetjes et al, 2019). In our view, while the gestures used for English stops and the Spanish phoneme /u/ provide clearly visible articulatory information about the target sound, this is not the case for the gesture used for the phoneme /θ/, which depicts the tongue shape during the production of this consonant but lacks crucial information about the location of the tongue relative to the teeth or jaw aperture.…”

“…In the context of L2 pronunciation learning, to our knowledge, only two empirical studies have assessed the role of the hand gestures mimicking phonetic features in L2 segmental learning (Amand & Touhami, 2016;Hoetjes et al, 2019). Amand and Touhami (2016) gestures. For the G group, a fist-to-open-palm hand gesture was used to illustrate the released stops, while a stretched-fingers-to-fist gesture was used for the unreleased stops.…”

“…We adopted a fist-to-open-hand gesture (hand burst gesture, see Figure 2) from Amand and Touhami (2016) and Zhang (2002) to simulate the extra burst of air, which refers to the aspiration feature of Mandarin aspirated plosives as they are perceived with a stronger air burst and produced with more air release than the unaspirated plosives. We hypothesize that the use of the hand burst gesture will be beneficial for the learning of aspirated plosives.…”