Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English: Focus on Intelligibility
About this ebook
- Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly?
- If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them?
- Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility?
The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, a over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).
About the author
Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. linguistics, teaches at Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota. He is the author of four books and author/co-author of several dozen articles on acoustic phonetics, phonology, language planning and policy, emergent orthographies, syntax, and translation. His acoustic phonetic research is synergetic, encompassing L2 acoustic phonetics of English (Speech Intelligibility from the perspectives of the Critical Band Theory), sociophonetics of Central Minnesota English, general acoustic phonetics of Anyi (a West African language), acoustic phonetic feature extraction for application in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS), and voice biometrics for speaker verification. He can be reached at [email protected].
