“Reading in Foreign Tongues”

Univ.-Prof. PhD Ineke Mennen 5 December2015

Book of Judges, ch. 12

Shibboleth

Scheveningen

Scheveningen?

Learners struggle with more than just the sounds.....

-  intonation -  rhythm -  tempo -  loudness -  voice quality .... ..... are also difficult!

Do second language learners use pitch in different ways for

each language?

Pitch = the height of someone’s voice in speech

Unfriendly or overexcited? The case of British English and German pitch

“unfriendly” “bored”

German about British British about German “overexcited”

“aggressive”

Stereotyping in part based on differences in pitch Eckert & Laver, 1994

12 monolingual German females 12 monolingual English females 12 German-English bilingual females (acquired English as a second language before age 10)

Text Joke The North Wind and the Sun Der Nordwind und die Sonne

Pitch = the height of someone’s voice in speech

Retelling of joke in English and in German

So… what did we find?

150

200

250

300

350

Joke Text

Monolingual English L2 learners in English L2 learners in German Monolingual German

Scharff, Miller & Mennen, 2008

Do listeners attend to pitch when deciding what language is spoken?

Mennen, Schaeffler & Docherty

English German

Does this sound English or German?

1 very unsure

2 very unsure

3 very unsure

4 very unsure

5 very sure

Do we need to hear words to establish whether someone is foreign?

Munro (1995)

low-pass filtered ‚muffled‘ speech

speech played backwards

research tells us we are able to tell whether someone is foreign without hearing any words!

Munro et al. (2003)

Prosody: intonation, pitch, rhythm, stress...

What makes second language learners sound more foreign: their pronunciation of sounds, or their prosody (intonation,

rhythm, stress)?

Ulbrich & Mennen, 2015

The case of German learners of Belfast English Why these? Because they differ considerably in sounds as well as intonation

What’s typical about Belfast English sounds and intonation…..

Loss of some vowel contrasts: vowels sounding the same

Mostly rising intonation

Flat intonation

Our experimental design

Participants - native Belfast speaker - native German speaker (never been in Belfast) - L2 learners who had lived in Belfast for more than 3 years

They all read out a text from which we extracted some short utterances these were manipulated with technique ‘prosodic manipulation’

Our experimental design Introducing prosodic manipulation

Belfast English (BfE) speaker German speaker German learner of BfE

" " "

Our experimental design Introducing prosodic manipulation

Belfast English (BfE) speaker German speaker German learner of BfE

BfE sounds + German prosody

L2 sounds + BfE prosody

German sounds + L2 prosody

What makes second language learners sound more foreign: segments or prosody?

BB

BL2

BG

L2L2

L2B

L2G

GL2

GB

GG 11.5

22.5

33.5

44.5

55.5

6

Foreign Accent Ratings

Ulbrich & Mennen (2015)

Is it possible to fail the shibboleth test in your native language?

De Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010

•  57 native German migrants who had moved in adulthood (at average age of 27) to either Canada (N=34) or the Netherlands (N=23)

•  They had resided in Canada/Netherlands for 27 years on average

•  5 native Germans living in Germany (controls)

Recordings of participants retelling sequence of Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times in German, i.e. in their native language

“Cleaned” extracts (no hesitations, long pauses, no grammatical errors) played to native German listeners who determined whether they were native speakers of German

Is it possible to fail the shibboleth test in your native language?

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

English L2 Dutch L2 Germancontrols

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

Clearlynative

Unclear FAR

Clearly non-native

20

14

23

De Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010

Lack of quality contact with the native German language affected perceptions of foreign accent in migrants‘native language

References •  De Leeuw, E., Schmid, M. & Mennen, I. (2010). The effects of contact on

native language pronunciation in an L2 migrant setting. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 (1), 33-40.

•  Mennen, I., Schaeffler, F. & Dickie, C. (2014). Second language acquisition of pitch range in German learners of English. Studies of Second Language Acquisition, 36, 303–329.

•  Mennen, I., Schaeffler, F. & Docherty, G. (2012) Cross-language difference in f0 range: a comparative study of English and German. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131 (3), 2249-2260.

•  Munro, M.J., Derwing, T.M., & Burgess, C. (2003). The detection of foreign accent in backwards speech. In M.-J. Sole, De. Recasens & J. Romero (Eds.). Proc. of the 15th ICPhS.

•  Munro, M. J. (1995) Nonsegmental factors in foreign accent: ratings of filtered speech, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17, 17-33.

•  Scharff-Rethfeldt, W., Miller, N. & Mennen, I. (2008). Unterschiede in der mittlere Sprechtonhöhe bei Deutsch/Englisch bilingualen Sprechern (Speaking Fundamental Frequency Differences in Bilinguals of German/English). Sprache Stimme Gehör, 32: 123 – 128.

•  Ulbrich, C. & Mennen, I. (2015). When prosody kicks in! The intricate interplay between segments and prosody in perceptions of foreign accent. International Journal of Bilingualism 03/2015; Online First. DOI:10.1177/1367006915572383.

Thank you!

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Questions?