Variability in L2 Vowel Production: Different Elicitation Methods Affect Individual Speakers Differently

Abstract

Elicitation methods are known to influence second language speech production. For teachers and language assessors, awareness of such effects is essential to accurate interpretations of testing outcomes. For speech researchers, understanding why one method gives better performance than another may yield insights into how second-language phonological knowledge is acquired, stored, and retrieved. Given these concerns, this investigation compared L2 vowel intelligibility on two elicitation tasks and determined the degree to which differences generalized across vowels, vowels in context, lexical items, and individual speakers. The dependent variable was the intelligibility of Cantonese speakers' productions of English /i I u ℧/ in varying phonetic environments. In a picture-naming task, the speakers produced responses without an auditory prompt. In a second task–interrupted repetition–they heard exemplars of the same targets without pictures, and repeated each one after counting aloud to 10, a step intended to disrupt their short-term auditory store and therefore prevent simple mimicry. For target words with scores below 80% on picture naming, mean intelligibility was more than 10 points higher on interrupted repetition. However, that difference did not generalize across conditions or across speakers. Thus, although it is technically accurate to say that, on average, interrupted repetition yielded better vowel intelligibility than did picture naming, that observation requires a great deal of qualification, particularly because of individual speaker differences. The outcomes are interpreted in terms of their relevance to language assessment and phonetic learning.

Acoustic Analyses of L1 and L2 Vowel Interactions in Mandarin–Cantonese Late Bilinguals

“…Firstly, in terms of the elicitation method, the vowels were produced in sentences as responses to precursor questions asked by the experimenter. It has been demonstrated that different elicitation methods will influence how vowels are produced, leading to varying degrees of individual differences [38]. The issue of phonetic accommodation is also worth noting because there is recent evidence that both the L1 and L2 undergo phonetic accommodation [39], so that the L1 and L2 vowels produced in this study may have been affected by the experimenter's vowels.…”

Accents 2023. Accent perception and production. 16th International Conference on Native and Non-native Accents of English, Łódź, 30 Nov – 2 Dec, 2023. The Book of Abtracts

“…Processing Laboratory, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland Phonetic imitation in L2 is gaining interest in second-language speech research(Cao 2023;Chen et al 2023;Jiang & Kennison 2022;Munro 2022;Rojczyk et al 2023). The analysis of the emerging publications reveals that most studies concentrate on adult learners, at the same time largely disregarding younger learners.…”