Tanya Visceglia

This study investigates the effect of sentence-level prosody on production of English lexical stress, comparing L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups. 4 L1 North American English speakers and 9 L1 Taiwan Mandarin speakers were asked to produce a set of 20 disyllabic and multisyllabic words embedded in three different prosodic contexts: neutral broad focus, at a phrase/sentence boundary, and in narrow focus. Results suggest that production of the prosodic cues to mark lexical stress (F0, duration and amplitude) becomes much more difficult for L2 speakers when disyllabic and multisyllabic words are embedded in higher-level prosodic contexts.

L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin discourselength English speech data extracted from the TWNAESOP corpus was analyzed using a perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework in order to investigate similarities and differences in the organization of discourse-level speech planning in English across L1 (native) and L2 (non-native) speaker groups. While both groups appear to produce similar configurations of acoustic contrasts to signal discourse units and boundaries, L1 speakers were found to produce these cues more robustly. Between-group differences in discourse units were also found through the distribution of prosodic break levels and break locations. These findings can be attributed to the size and scope of speech planning and chunking, whereby L2 speakers, possibly due to on-line processing limitations in L2, use more intermediate chunking units and fewer larger-scale planning units in prosodic discourse organization. Future cross-L1 comparisons will inves...

This research is part of the ongoing multinational collaboration “Asian English Speech cOrpus Project ” (AESOP), whose aim is to build up a speech corpus representing the varieties of English spoken in Asia. The present paper describes tasks designed to elicit production of a comprehensive range of English segmental and suprasegmental characteristics in the form of spontaneous speech. Segmental and suprasegmental properties of spontaneous speech have been shown to differ significantly from those of read speech; nevertheless, much of the data used to develop man-machine speech communication systems has, for the most part, been based on read speech. Experiments designed to elicit a full range of L2 English segmental and prosodic features in spontaneous speech could efficiently collect an inventory of these features in a database, which could be used for further phonetic studies as well as modeling and ICT tool development tailored to the Asian L2 English-speaking population.

We report an experimental study of English and Mandarin Chinese utterance-level prosodic contours produced by native and non-native speakers, with a focus on whether second-language speakers appropriately differentiate sentences of three illocutionary types: ...

This study investigates the effect of sentence-level prosody on production of English lexical stress, comparing L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups. 4 L1 North American English speakers and 9 L1 Taiwan Mandarin speakers were asked to produce a set of 20 disyllabic and multisyllabic words embedded in three different prosodic contexts: neutral broad focus, at a phrase/sentence boundary, and in narrow focus. Results suggest that production of the prosodic cues to mark lexical stress (F0, duration and amplitude) becomes much more difficult for L2 speakers when disyllabic and multisyllabic words are embedded in higher-level prosodic contexts.

This research is part of the ongoing multinational collaboration “Asian English Speech cOrpus Project” (AESOP), whose aim is to build up a speech corpus representing the varieties of English spoken in Asia. The present paper describes tasks designed to elicit production of a comprehensive range of English segmental and suprasegmental characteristics in the form of spontaneous speech. Segmental and suprasegmental properties of spontaneous speech have been shown to differ significantly from those of read speech; nevertheless, much of the data used to develop man-machine speech communication systems has, for the most part, been based on read speech. Experiments designed to elicit a full range of L2 English segmental and prosodic features in spontaneous speech could efficiently collect an inventory of these features in a database, which could be used for further phonetic studies as well as modeling and ICT tool development tailored to the Asian L2 English-speaking population.

Learning the stress patterns of English words presents a challenge for L1 speakers from syllable-timed and/or tone languages. Realization of stress contrasts in previous studies has been measured in a variety of ways. This study adapts and extends Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), a method generally used to measure duration as a property of speech rhythm, to compare F0 and amplitude contrasts across L1 and L2 production of stressed and unstressed syllables in English multisyllabic words. L1 North American English and L1 Taiwan-Mandarin English speech data were extracted from the AESOP-ILAS corpus. Results of acoustic analysis show that overall, stress contrasts were realized most robustly by L1 English speakers. A general pattern of contrast underdifferentiation was found in L2 speakers with respect to F0, duration and intensity, with the most striking difference found in F0. These results corroborate our earlier findings on L1 Mandarin speakers’ production of on-focus/post-focus co...

This position paper highlights the importance of suprasegmental training in secondary language (L2) acquisition. Suprasegmental features are manifested in terms of acoustic cues and convey important information about linguistic and information structures. Hence, L2 learners must harness appropriate suprasegmental productions for effective communication. However, this learning process is influenced by well-established perceptions of sounds and articulatory motions in the primary language (L1). We propose to design and collect a corpus to support systematic analysis of L2 suprasegmental features. We lay out a set of carefully selected textual environments that illustrate how suprasegmental features convey information including part-ofspeech, syntax, focus, speech acts and semantics. We intend to use these textual environments for collecting speech data in a variety of Asian Englishes from non-native English speakers. Analyses of such corpora should lead to research findings that have ...

This study compares the realization of English narrow focus by L1 speakers of English and Taiwan Mandarin. Results show that L1 Taiwan Mandarin speakers produce a much smaller increase in average F0 and amplitude for on-focus words and a much smaller decrease in average F0 and amplitude on post-focus words than L1 English speakers do. Moreover, post-focus compression of F0 range and duration, very strongly realized by L1 English speakers, were entirely absent in L2 speakers’ production. Failure to perform post-focus compression of F0 range and duration may be attributable to transfer of L1 prosodic patterns. However, transfer cannot account for L2 speakers’ weak realization of onfocus F0 range and amplitude expansion. We argue that the weakness of L2 speakers’ on-focus/postfocus contrast realization reflects limitations on L2 speech processing, and that weak realization of focus contrasts may also contribute to listeners’ difficulty in interpreting the intended focus of L2 utterances.

We report an experimental study of English and Mandarin Chinese utterance-level prosodic contours produced by native and non-native speakers, with a focus on whether second-language speakers appropriately differentiate sentences of three illocutionary types: ...

A perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework was used in this study to investigate similarities and differences in the size and strategy of discourse-level speech planning across L1 and L2 English speaker groups. While both groups appear to produce similar configurations of acoustic contrasts to signal discourse boundaries, L1 speakers were found to produce these cues more robustly in English. Differences were also found between L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups with respect to the distribution of prosodic break levels and break locations. These differences in L1 and L2 organization of discourse speech prosody in English can be largely attributed to between-group differences in speech planning and chunking strategies whereby L2 speakers use more intermediate chunking units and fewer larger-scale planning units in their prosodic discourse organization. Through more understanding of prosody transfer, we believe that technology developed on the basis of L1 Mandarin spoken language processing may be applied to L2 English produced by the same speaker population, with little modification.