Live or leave! Vowel quality and vowel length in the intelligibility of advanced Spanish-accented English
Résumé
Often characterised as short and long in both research and teaching practice (Cruttenden, 2008; Hancock, 2012, Walker, 2010), the KIT and FLEECE vowels are commonly confused by Spanish learners of English as their mother tongue lacks a similar distinction (RAE, 2011). Length is also traditionally insisted upon in instruction and even more recent intelligibility-based (Levis, 2005) approaches to international English (Jenkins, 2000; Walker, 2010) advocate its importance prioritising it over vowel quality. The goal of this paper is to examine the role of vowel length and quality in Spanish-accented English from a quantitative and qualitative exploratory perspective. Sixty advanced English speakers with L1 Spanish were recorded and the acoustic properties of their FLEECE and KIT vowels were analysed in the words live and leave. The overall intelligibility (Kang et al., 2018; Wang, 2007), comprehensibility, and foreign-accentedness (Derwing & Munro, 1997, 2015) of the participants’ speech were assessed online by an international sample of 330 listeners from 28 L1 backgrounds. No association was detected between the overall pronunciation scores and vowel length. However, some evidence suggested that distinguishing at least one formant might be associated with increased comprehensibility and decreased accentedness. Additionally, the analysis of phonological intelligibility breakdowns showed that these could only be explained with a reference to formant values but not length distinctions. Thus, it is argued that vowel length in KIT and FLEECE may be disregarded and the focus in receptive and productive instruction should be on quality distinctions.
Domaines
| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
|---|---|
| Licence |