What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners

Mairano, Paolo; Santiago, Fabián

doi:10.1017/s0959269520000010

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 54 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…The vowels produced by the learners in the high vocabulary group as compared to the low vocabulary group were more accurately identified as the intended target by listeners, and vocabulary size as a continuous measure was a significant predictor of average intelligibility, unlike years of English study or length of stay in Australia. Similarly, Mairano and Santiago (2020) reported that vocabulary size correlated moderately with fluency measures and ratings of accentedness. In addition, one study has examined the relationship between L2 vocabulary size and lexical encoding.…”

Section: Second Language Vocabulary Sizementioning

confidence: 88%

Vocabulary Size Is a Key Factor in Predicting Second Language Lexical Encoding Accuracy

Daidone

Darcy

2021

Front. Psychol.

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This study investigates the relationship between the accuracy of second language lexical representations and perception, phonological short-term memory, inhibitory control, attention control, and second language vocabulary size. English-speaking learners of Spanish were tested on their lexical encoding of the Spanish /ɾ-r/, /ɾ-d/, /r-d/, and /f-p/ contrasts through a lexical decision task. Perception ability was measured with an oddity task, phonological short-term memory with a serial non-word recognition task, attention control with a flanker task, inhibitory control with a retrieval-induced inhibition task, and vocabulary size with the X_Lex vocabulary test. Results revealed that differences in perception performance, inhibitory control, and attention control were not related to differences in lexical encoding accuracy. Phonological short-term memory was a significant factor, but only for the /r-ɾ/ contrast. This suggests that when representations contain sounds that are differentiated along a dimension not used in the native language, learners with higher phonological short-term memory have an advantage because they are better able to hold the relevant phonetic details in memory long enough to be transferred to long-term representations. Second language vocabulary size predicted lexical encoding across three of the four contrasts, such that a larger vocabulary predicted greater accuracy. This is likely because the acquisition of more phonologically similar words forces learners’ phonological systems to create more detailed representations in order for such words to be differentiated. Overall, this study suggests that vocabulary size in the second language is the most important factor in the accuracy of lexical representations.

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Section: Second Language Vocabulary Sizementioning

confidence: 88%

Vocabulary Size Is a Key Factor in Predicting Second Language Lexical Encoding Accuracy

Daidone

Darcy

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…It seems reasonable to assume that front rounded vowels can be assimilated to the corresponding primary cardinal vowels, i.e., either unrounded front vowels /i/, /e/, /E/, or rounded back vowels /u/, /o/, /O/. There is evidence in the literature that /y/ tends to be assimilated to /u/ by English L1 (Ruellot 2011;Darcy et al 2012;Liakin et al 2015;Melnik-Leroy et al 2022), Spanish L1 (Racine and Detey 2018), and Italian L1 learners (Pillot-Loiseau and Grando 2020); however, it seems that English L1 learners tend to assimilate /ø/ -/o/ (Darcy et al 2012), while Spanish L1 and Italian L1 learners tend to assimilate /ø/ -/e/ (Kartushina and Frauenfelder 2014;Mairano and Santiago 2020). Therefore, we tested mid front rounded vowels against the corresponding back rounded vowels for English L1 learners, and against front unrounded vowels for Spanish L1 and Italian L1 learners.…”

Section: Selection Of Vowel Contrastsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can L2 Pronunciation Be Evaluated without Reference to a Native Model? Pillai Scores for the Intrinsic Evaluation of L2 Vowels

Mairano,

Santiago,

Roa

2023

Languages

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In this article, we explore the possibility of evaluating L2 pronunciation, and, more specifically, L2 vowels, without referring to a native model, i.e., intrinsically. Instead of comparing L2 vowel productions to native speakers’ productions, we use Pillai scores to measure the overlap between target vowel categories in L2 English (/iː/ — /ɪ/, /ɑː/ — /æ/, /ɜː/ — /ʌ/, /uː/ — /ʊ/) for L1 French, L1 Spanish, and L1 Italian learners (n = 40); and in L2 French (/y/ — /u/, /ø/ — /o/, /ø/ — /e/, /ɛ˜/ — /e /, /ɑ˜/ — /a/, /ɔ˜/ — /o/) for L1 English, L1 Spanish, and L1 Italian learners (n = 48). We assume that a greater amount of overlap within a contrast indicates assimilated categories in a learner’s production, whereas a smaller amount of overlap indicates the establishment of phonological categories and distinct realisations for members of the contrast. Pillai scores were significant predictors of native ratings of comprehensibility and/or nativelikeness for many of the contrasts considered. Despite some limitations and caveats, we argue that Pillai scores and similar methods for the intrinsic evaluation of L2 pronunciation can be used, (i) to avoid direct comparisons of L2 users’ performance with native monolinguals, following recent trends in SLA research; (ii) when comparable L1 data are not available; (iii) within longitudinal studies to track the progressive development of new phonological categories.

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“…In order to quantify the overlap of realizations for target vowel pairs, we computed Pillai scores. This score has been used in the literature to evaluate the degree of vowel mergers and splits [22] and to assess L2 pronunciation [23,24]. Pillai scores range from 0 (complete overlap of categories) to 1 (complete separation of categories).…”

Section: Acoustic Metrics For Assessing L2 Vowel Accuracymentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of prosodic prominence on the acquisition of L2 phonological features

Santiago¹,

Mairano²,

Paolis³

2022

Speech Prosody 2022

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Mainstream L2 phonology models do not include predictions concerning how the prosodic structure interacts with the acquisition of segments. However, many studies have shown that the realization of pitch accents or melodic contours associated to prosodic boundaries results in the hyperarticulation of segments in correspondence of such prosodic boundaries. Our goal is to provide empirical evidence for the positive effects of prosodic prominence on the acquisition of challenging L2 French soundsThe prosodic-phonetic interface has been largely underestimated in second language acquisition. Few studies have investigated whether prosodic prominence may serve as an optimal context for learners to extract information on the acoustic properties of new sounds, which may then be reflected in more accurate productions. In this paper, we report the acoustic patterns of L2 French vowels produced in two different prosodic conditions: (1) in word internal position (unaccented), (2) in initial and final boundaries of Accentual Phrases and Intonation Phrases. We analyzed oral productions by 40 participants: 10 French native speakers and 30 L2 French learners with L1 Spanish, L1 English and L1 Italian (10 each). We extracted acoustic parameters for ~15k vowels and calculated the degree of acoustic overlap via Pillai scores for the following triplets:

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What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners

Cited by 10 publications

References 54 publications

Vocabulary Size Is a Key Factor in Predicting Second Language Lexical Encoding Accuracy

Vocabulary Size Is a Key Factor in Predicting Second Language Lexical Encoding Accuracy

Can L2 Pronunciation Be Evaluated without Reference to a Native Model? Pillai Scores for the Intrinsic Evaluation of L2 Vowels

The effects of prosodic prominence on the acquisition of L2 phonological features

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