The Production of New and Similar Vowels by Adult German Learners of English

Abstract

The study reported in this paper examined the effect of second language (L2) experience on the production of L2 vowels for which acoustic counterparts are either present or absent in the first language (L1). The hypothesis being tested was that amount of L2 experience would not affect L1 German speakers' production of the "similar" English vowels /i, I, el, whereas English language experience would enable L1 Germans to produce an English-like /ae/, which has no counterpart in German. The predictions were tested in two experiments that compared the production of English /i, I, e, ae/ by two groups of L1 German speakers differing in English language experience and an L1 English control group. An acoustic experiment compared the three groups for spectral and temporal characteristics of the English vowels produced in /bW words. The same tokens were assessed for intelligibility in a labeling experiment. The results of both experiments were largely consistent with the hypothesis. The experienced L2 speakers did not produce the similar English vowels /i, I, el more intelligibly than the inexperienced L2 speakers, nor did experience have a positive effect on approximating the English acoustic norms for these similar vowels. The intelligibility results for the new vowel /as/ did This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NS20963-04) and conducted at the Department of Biocommunication, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA. The authors thank Laurie Skelton for her help in conducting the listening experiment and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous draft of this article.Part of the results reported here were presented at

Foreign Language Learners Acquire L2 Phonetic Detail: Goose and Foot Fronting in Non-Native English

“…In contrast to the L2-immersed individuals, learners who are not consistently exposed to L2 input in the ambient environment, such as instructed learners of a foreign language, may not show improvement over time (e.g. Bohn & Flege 1992).…”

L1 Transfer in the Production of Fricatives and Stops by Pattani-Malay Learners of English in Thailand

“…mentioned that the similarities of some sounds in different languages will not help language learners to produce the sounds similar to their first language correctly, and most researchers agree that there are a lot of difficulties in pronunciation of the languages which are different from their mother tongue (Bohn & Flege, 1992;Trofimovich, Gatbonton, & Segalowitz, 2007). Many studies focusing on the error analysis of pronunciation have shown that the most errors produced by the L1 speakers of Malay and Indonesian, which are really close to Pattani-Malay, are fricatives and stops.…”

Cross-linguistic vowel variation in trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German

“…Bohn and Flege (1992) found that in native German speakers the effect of L2 experience was smaller in the realization of similar English vowels than in the realization of new vowels. Baker and Trofimovich (2005) found that the degree and direction of L1-L2 influences in early and late Korean-English bilinguals appeared to depend on the degree of acoustic similarity between L1 and L2 vowels but that cross-language similarity was more likely to influence the late, than the early, bilinguals.…”

“…The age of acquisition was likewise found to have an effect on the size of the vowel space in Quechua-Spanish bilinguals. O'Rourke (2010) found a larger overall vowel space in late Quechua-Spanish bilinguals than in early bilinguals (see also Bohn and Flege, 1992;Munro et al, 1996;Flege et al, 1997;Baker and Trofimovich, 2005;MacLeod et al, 2009;HaimesKusomoto, 2010).…”

“…In more informal speech, /E+/ tends to be merged with /e+/ (cf. Bohn and Flege, 1992;Jørgensen, 1969;Kohler, 1995, p. 172;P€ atzold and Simpson, 1997;Steinlen, 2005, p. 79). Additionally, SF is reported to have a complete set of short tense close vowels /i y u/, which are in opposition with long tense close /i+ y+ u+/ and short lax close /I Y U/ (Sj€ olin, 1969, p. 67;Kramer, 1982;Fort, 2015, p. XV).…”