Vowel dynamics in the acquisition of L2 English - an acoustic study of L1 Polish learners

This article presents an acoustic study of the acquisition of vowel formant dynamics in L2 (Southern British) English by Polish learners at two levels of proficiency, along with baseline data from L1 English and L1 Polish. Results from our experiment suggest that the acquisition of English vowels by...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage acquisition Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 227 - 254
Main Authors Schwartz, Geoffrey, Kaźmierski, Kamil
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Mahwah Routledge 02.07.2020
Psychology Press
Subjects
Accentuation
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustics
British English
College Freshmen
Contrastive Linguistics
English (Second Language)
English as a second language
English proficiency
Foreign Countries
Formants
Language Variation
Measurement
Native Language
Non-native accent
Phonetics
Phonology
Polish
Polish language
Pronunciation
Second Language Instruction
Second Language Learning
Sound duration
Speech Communication
Vowels
Poland
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Summary:This article presents an acoustic study of the acquisition of vowel formant dynamics in L2 (Southern British) English by Polish learners at two levels of proficiency, along with baseline data from L1 English and L1 Polish. Results from our experiment suggest that the acquisition of English vowels by Polish learners entails a temporal reorganization such that vocalic targets in English are housed later in a vowel's duration than they are in Polish or Polish-accented English. This leads to an increase in the degree of formant movement through the 20%-40% portion of vowel duration with increased English proficiency. Implications of these findings for cross-language phonetic similarity, a crucial concept for current theoretical models of L2 speech, are also discussed.
ISSN:1048-9223
1532-7817
DOI:10.1080/10489223.2019.1707204