The Resolution of Dynamic Speech in L2 Listening*

Abstract

In the absence of a comprehensive theory of the oral language, very little is really known about auditory decoding as a speech dynamic process in either L2 or L1. Since listening comprehension presupposes an orderly conversion of running speech into discrete linguistic units, certain restoration processes (operating on phonated speech as the input for listening) must apply. Thus, it is possible to view speech perception as a mirror‐image of speech production processes. Listening comprehension can then be seen to require two types of recovery rules: restoration to reverse the effects of absorption and boundary marking to facilitate the decomposition of the quasi‐uninterrupted acoustic signal into isolate lexical items. The approach adopted here provides a principled way to explain the striking metamorphosis language undergoes from dynamic speech representations to citation form strings, under listening conditions, and suggests speech perception strategies helpful to L2 listeners for acquiring and improving listening comprehension skills. The account of performance characteristics presented here shows that speech event and formal content belong to separate domains of language, mediated not so much by derivation as by covariation.

Second‐Language Acquisition and the Computational Paradigm*

“…It means minimally that a particular gender feature has be to paired with a large number of acoustic representations, which correspond to the pronunciation of the word in the speech stream. There is inductive generalization in this sense; one has to identify a word as a precondition for gender attribution, a rather complicated task that involves various kinds of representations and processes (Church, 1987;Grosjean & Gee, 1987;Hieke, 1987;Pisoni & Luce, 1987). I shall make the simplifying assumption that these various acoustic-phonetic representations are reinterpreted as part of the speech decoding process and appear in the phonological entry of the lexeme as a unique phonological representation.…”

Research into practice: How research appears in pronunciation teaching materials

“…), insertion ( We are said as We yar ), modification ( can't you as can chew ), and reductions (such as the consistent reduction of vowels in function words), all of which occur alone or in combination (Alameen & Levis in 2015). During the third wave revival of pronunciation teaching in the mid-1980s, research into CSPs, especially linking, was carried out by Henrichsen (1984) and Hieke (1984, 1987). Highly salient CSPs (e.g., gonna, wanna, whaddya ) also gained pedagogical attention from Weinstein (1982).…”

Teaching Proununciation from the Top Down

“…We really don't know him that much. A useful direction for developing exercises to work on the production and decoding of phonologically fluent utterances is provided by Hieke's (1987) recovery strategies for the resolution of lexical items and boundary markers in connected speech.…”