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Evaluation of Phonatory Behavior of German and French Speakers in Native and Non-native Speech
(2016)
Phonatory behavior of German speakers (GS) and French speakers (FS) in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speech was instrumentally examined. Vowel productions of the two groups were analyzed using a parametrization of phonatory behaviour and phonatory quality properties in the acoustic signal. The behavior of GS is characterized by more strained adduction of the vocal folds whereas FS show more incomplete glottal closure. Furthermore, GS change their phonatory behavior in the foreign language (=French) by adapting phonatory strategies of FS, whereas FS do not show this tendency. In addition, German beginners (BEG) and partly German advanced learners (ADV) are already orientated on production characteristics of the L2. French BEG however retain their phonatory behavior in L2 (=German) by showing less vocal fold adduction in comparison to their L1. French ADV show the opposite behavior. Finally, ADV of the two speaker groups generally show more strained behavior in L2 productions than BEG. The results provide evidence that GS and FS apply different laryngeal phonatory settings and that they altered their settings in L2 differently. Perceptual evaluation of voice quality of the speech material and a correlation analysis between acoustic and perceptual results are suggested for future research.
The IFCASL corpus is a French-German bilingual phonetic learner corpus designed, recorded and annotated in a project on individualized feedback in computer-assisted spoken language learning. The motivation for setting up this corpus was that there is no phonetically annotated and segmented corpus for this language pair of comparable of size and coverage. In contrast to most learner corpora, the IFCASL corpus incorporate data for a language pair in both directions, i.e. in our case French learners of German, and German learners of French. In addition, the corpus is complemented by two sub-corpora of native speech by the same speakers. The corpus provides spoken data by about 100 speakers with comparable productions, annotated and segmented on the word and the phone level, with more than 50% manually corrected data. The paper reports on inter-annotator agreement and the optimization of the acoustic models for forced speech-text alignment in exercises for computer-assisted pronunciation training. Example studies based on the corpus data with a phonetic focus include topics such as the realization of /h/ and glottal stop, final devoicing of obstruents, vowel quantity and quality, pitch range, and tempo.
The Perceptual Effect of L1 Prosody Transplantation on L2 Speech: The Case of French Accented German
(2016)
Research has shown that language learners are not only challenged by segmental differences between their native language (L1) and the second language (L2). They also have problems with the correct production of suprasegmental structures, like phone/syllable duration and the realization of pitch. These difficulties often lead to a perceptible foreign accent. This study investigates the influence of prosody transplantation on foreign accent ratings. Syllable duration and pitch contour were transferred from utterances of a male and female German native speaker to utterances of ten French native speakers speaking German. Acoustic measurements show that French learners spoke with a significantly lower speaking rate. As expected, results of a perception experiment judging the accentedness of 1) German native utterances, 2) unmanipulated and 3) manipulated utterances of French learners of German suggest that the transplantation of the prosodic features syllable duration and pitch leads to a decrease in accentedness rating. These findings confirm results found in similar studies investigating prosody transplantation with different L1 and L2 and provide a beneficial technique for (computer-assisted) pronunciation training.