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Variabilité des syllabes réalisées par des apprenants de l'anglais (Analysing syllable variability in a French learner corpus of English)

Summary

The authors seek a more reliable way to compare the rhythm of English speech produced by native speakers and by francophone learners. Popular rhythm metrics, which go back to Ramus et al. (1999), measure consonantal and vocalic intervals. Instead, the authors propose measuring the duration of genuine linguistic units, namely syllables. The material consists of read texts from the ANGLISH corpus, recorded by native speakers of English and by two groups of French students of different proficiency levels. First, experts manually syllabified the native speakers' speech, relying on the Longman Pronouncing Dictionary. This syllabification served as a template onto which the learners' productions were mapped by forced alignment in WinPitch LTL. Syllables were classified by their position in the utterance, their structure, and their stress. Expected influences of French were taken into account separately: inserted (epenthetic) vowels, lengthening of unstressed syllables, and a tendency to pronounce all syllables with equal duration (isosyllabicity). Native and non-native speakers turned out to realize these syllable types in statistically significantly different ways. The authors conclude that the functional syllable typology distinguishes speakers' proficiency levels better than interval-based metrics. It can therefore be applied to automatic pronunciation assessment and to research in interlanguage phonology.

Key points

  • Data: four passages from EuRom01 within the ANGLISH corpus (Tortel 2009). They were read by 20 speakers from each of three groups: native speakers of English, FR1 (intermediate level), and FR2 (third-year undergraduate students of English).
  • Reference: two annotators identified 99 target syllables in 65 words, with inter-annotator agreement of κ ≈ 90 %.
  • The typology comprises 12 classes: Focus, Final, MaxCoda, Syllabiq, Interton, RedFin, RedCoda, happY, preCV, preCC, monCV, monCC. When a syllable falls into several classes, the priority is as follows: focus > position in the utterance > number of syllables in the word > syllable structure.
  • Stress is simplified to four levels: primary, secondary, unstressed unreduced, and unstressed reduced.
  • As future work, the authors propose applying the same approach to intonation contours. Examples include emphatic do and parenthetical worse still, which native speakers pronounce fairly consistently.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages · Education

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{ballier2016variabilite,
  title = {{Variabilité des syllabes réalisées par des apprenants de l'anglais (Analysing syllable variability in a French learner corpus of English)}},
  author = {Ballier, Nicolas and Martin, Philippe and Amand, Maelle},
  booktitle = {Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016. volume 1 : JEP},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2016.jeptalnrecital-jep.82/}
}

References

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