Bastien!De!Clercq! The!productionof!nonnative!vowels...

Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte Academiejaar 2011-‐2012

Bastien De Clercq

The production of nonnative vowels by early learners: A study on phonological elicitation methods for children

Master in Advanced Studies in Linguistics

Masterpaper voorgedragen tot het bekomen van de graad van

Master in Advanced Studies in Linguistics

Promotor: Dr. Ellen Simon

Vakgroep Taalkunde

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude for the help and support the following people

have given me while writing my thesis. First and foremost, I would like to thank my

supervisor, Dr. Ellen Simon, for her continuous theoretical and practical advice,

without which this thesis would not have been possible.

I am also indebted to the administration, the teaching staff and, last but not least, the

pupils of the Sint-‐Janscollege, who were so kind as to help me set up the

phonological experiments and gather the data for my thesis.

Many thanks are also due to the native speakers of English for their cooperation to

my study and for their enthusiasm for my research.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents and Elien for their keen interest in my

thesis.

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Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 5

2. BACKGROUND .............................................................................................................................. 8

2.1 ENGLISH IN THE EUROPEAN UNION .............................................................................................. 8 2.1.1 The inner, outer and expanding circles of English .................................................................... 8 2.1.2 English in Belgium and Flanders ...................................................................................................... 9

2.2 ACQUIRING A SECOND LANGUAGE ............................................................................................... 11 2.2.1 Language-‐dependent factors in SLA .............................................................................................. 11 2.2.2 Learner-‐dependent factors in SLA ................................................................................................. 13 2.2.3 Foreign accent, comprehensibility and intelligibility ............................................................ 14

2.3 DUTCH AND ENGLISH PHONOLOGY ............................................................................................. 17 2.3.1 The Dutch and English vowel systems ......................................................................................... 17 2.3.2 The perception and production of the English vowels /ɪ,ɛ,æ/ by Dutch speakers ... 19

2.4 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATION .......................................................................................... 21

3. EXPERIMENT 1: READING ...................................................................................................... 23

3.1 METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................................... 23 3.1.1 Participants .............................................................................................................................................. 23 3.1.2 Materials .................................................................................................................................................... 24 3.1.3 Procedure .................................................................................................................................................. 25 3.1.4 Analysis and evaluation ...................................................................................................................... 25

3.2 RESULTS ....................................................................................................................................... 26 3.2.1 Acoustic analysis .................................................................................................................................... 26 3.2.2 Native speaker evaluation ................................................................................................................. 27 3.2.3 Statistical analysis ................................................................................................................................. 29

3.3 DISCUSSION .................................................................................................................................. 30

4. EXPERIMENT 2: REPETITION ............................................................................................... 31


4.2 RESULTS ....................................................................................................................................... 32 4.2.1 Acoustic analysis .................................................................................................................................... 32

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4.2.2 Native speaker evaluation ................................................................................................................. 33 4.2.3 Statistical analysis ................................................................................................................................. 35

4.3 DISCUSSION .................................................................................................................................. 35

5. EXPERIMENT 3: PICTURE-‐NAMING .................................................................................... 36


5.2 RESULTS ....................................................................................................................................... 39 5.2.1 Acoustic analysis .................................................................................................................................... 39 5.2.2 Native speaker evaluation ................................................................................................................. 41 5.2.3 Statistical analysis ................................................................................................................................. 42

5.3 DISCUSSION .................................................................................................................................. 43

6. GENERAL DISCUSSION ............................................................................................................. 43

6.1 PARTICIPANTS’ REALIZATION OF /ɪ, Ɛ, Æ/ ................................................................................. 44 6.2 NATIVE SPEAKERS’ PERCEPTION OF /ɪ, Ɛ, Æ/ ............................................................................ 46 6.3 DATA GATHERING METHODS FOR RESEARCH IN SLA ................................................................ 50

7. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 51

8. APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................... 54

8.1 APPENDIX A: ENGLISH CONTEXT-‐DEPENDENT WORDS ............................................................. 54 8.2 APPENDIX B: DUTCH CONTEXT-‐DEPENDENT WORDS ............................................................... 54

BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................. 55

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1. Introduction

In the last couple of decades, phonological research has revealed much about first

and second language acquisition. One of the main insights has been that the degree

of success in learning non-‐native sounds can be partially predicted by the distance

between a learner’s native language (L1) and the second language (L2) (e.g. Best,

McRoberts & Goodell, 2001; Flege, 1995). Furthermore, numerous studies have

emphasized the importance of the age of learning in second language acquisition

(SLA). It is striking that the literature has mainly focused on inexperienced and

experienced adult learners and that the speech of inexperienced young learners has

thus remained under-‐investigated. Not only is the study of the learning process of

these younger groups of scientific importance, the social and pedagogical

implications for this age group are also considerable, since there is a growing trend

to start L2 teaching at an early age, but little research on the positive or negative

effects of this for children’s (language) development.

The role of English as a lingua franca has been established in a growing number of

countries in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. Knowledge of English has

become indispensable in the professional and private life, which is now reflected in

the educational system of many European countries. In Belgium, for instance,

English is often taught from the age of 12-‐13 years on.

This study aims to shed more light on the early stages of language learning. To this

end, we will examine the relation between foreign accentedness and

comprehensibility. Though both these notions refer to perceptual phenomena, there

are some obvious differences. Whereas foreign accentedness is speech perceived as

non-‐native, this does not imply that it is incomprehensible, i.e. that the listener

cannot identify the speech sounds (Munro, 2008). It has, for instance, been found

that the English of L1 speakers of Chinese may be highly comprehensible to English

native speakers, even though these same native speakers found their English

strongly accented (Munro & Derwing, 1995). On the contrary, speech does not have

to be foreign accented in order to be incomprehensible, as reduced speech clarity

may also impair L1 comprehensibility. However, in some cases, ‘ill fits’ between the

phonological systems of an L1 and an L2 may result in incomprehensible, foreign

accented speech. Recent studies (e.g. Escudero, Benders & Lipski, 2009) have also

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emphasized the influence of acoustic cues, such as vowel duration, on

comprehensibility and foreign accentedness.

The first aim of this paper is of a methodological nature. Considering the gap in the

literature on child L2 acquisition, there has been no formal methodological

comparison of phonological elicitation methods. The choice of a methodology

depends on theoretical and practical considerations. Reading, repetition and

picture-‐naming tasks may all be designed in order to elicit data, but they do not do

this in the same way. With reading tasks, for instance, one has to take into account

the potential influence of orthography. Furthermore, some of these tests may be too

abstract for children and thus prove impractical.

Our first research question is thus which elicitation methods are practical for

children and which are not. The notion of practicality has different facets in this

question. First, we will consider the feasibility of the tasks. Some tasks may be too

cognitively challenging for the children. Secondly, the tests may or may not yield

different results. On the one hand, the theoretical differences between the tasks,

such as orthographic or aural input, may not surface in the results. On the other

hand, these differences may still influence the results. In this case, we will ask

ourselves which of the methods is most suitable for the research question. Finally, it

may also be that the most reliable results are to be obtained through a

complementary approach.

The second aim of this paper is to study the accentedness and comprehensibility of

the pronunciation of the English vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ by Flemish children before they

have any formal instruction in English. A previous study by Flege (1992) showed

that speakers of (Netherlandic) Dutch tend to assimilate English /æ/ to /ɛ/ because

Dutch lacks a phonetic and phonological category for the former sound. Based on

these findings and the predictions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best et al.,

2001) and the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) (see Section 2.2.1) we

hypothesize that Flemish children will comprehensibly produce the vowels /ɪ/ and

/ɛ/, but that they will tend to assimilate English /æ/ and /ɛ/ to Dutch /ɛ/. Since this

study is concerned with foreign accent and comprehensibility, special attention will

be devoted to the influence of acoustic cues (Escudero, 2001). Specifically, we will

examine which acoustic cues weigh more on accentedness or comprehensibility.

Since the scope of this study is too restricted for an elaborate investigation into

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these topics, these secondary questions only serve to indicate tendencies that should

be explored more deeply in further research. In this way, we hope to pave the way

for more methodologically consistent descriptions of the pronunciation of children

before formal instruction of the L2.

Thus, we will compare three different elicitation techniques, a reading task, a

repetition task and a picture-‐naming task to examine the pronunciation of the

English vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ by 10 Flemish children. Then, the vowel closeness (F1),

vowel frontness and liprounding (F2) and vowel duration will be measured using

PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2012). This acoustic analysis will be complemented by

a categorization task, in which 4 native speakers of British English will categorize

the vowels produced by the children and rate their accentedness. These

categorizations and ratings will provide an insight in comprehensibility and foreign

accentedness, respectively, since the categorization is believed to reflect

comprehensibility and the goodness rating the degree of foreign accent. The acoustic

analyses and categorization task will then be statistically analysed in order to

examine the relationship between the acoustic cues and the comprehensibility and

accentedness of the vowels. Finally, since these analyses will be made for the three

tasks independently, their results will be compared. This comparison will reveal

whether the choice of elicitation technique significantly influences the results or not.

In Section 2, we will present a brief overview of the sociolinguistic situation of

English in Europe, Belgium and Flanders (Section 2.1), a summary of some of the

insights of research in SLA (Section 2.2), previous studies on the acquisition of

English by speakers of Dutch (Section 2.3) and a few comments on the choice of

methodology in previous research (Section 2.4). Our main hypotheses will be

elaborated in Sections 2.3.2 and 2.4. We will describe the procedure, analyses and

results of the three experiments separately in Sections 3 to 5. These results will be

compared to each other in Section 6 and will be followed by some concluding

remarks in Section 7.

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2. Background

2.1 English in the European Union

2.1.1 The inner, outer and expanding circles of English

As English came to attain different statuses in the European Union, it has also had to

fulfil different roles. Kachru (1992) describes these roles on the basis of three

concentric circles. The first or ‘inner’ circle of English consists of countries where

English is used as the primary language, as in the USA or Ireland. The second circle is

the ‘outer circle’ or ‘extended circle’. In countries belonging to this circle, “English is

only one of two or more codes in the linguistic repertoire of such bilinguals or

multilinguals, and [it] has acquired an important status in the language policies in

most of such multilingual nations” (Kachru 1985 in Kachru, 1992: 38). Finally, the

third circle is the expanding circle and contains countries where English is used as

an international language, without there necessarily being colonial ties with inner

circle countries. Countries belonging to the expanding circle are equally

characterized by their dependency on the linguistic norms provided by the inner

circle.

Applied to the European Union, the concentric circle model mainly consists of an

inner and expanding circle. Berns (1995: 4) suggests a regional grouping for the

countries of the European Union (of 1994), in which English functions as a “language

of wider communication” within Europe. Moreover, Berns (1995) argues that this

grouping would be more representative of a culturally unified and economically

open European Union. English, then, seems to be the primary mode of

communication between the members of the EU. Of course, countries such as

England and Ireland belong to the inner circle of world Englishes, where English is

spoken as a primary language. Many other countries, however, belong to the non-‐

norm providing expanding circle according to Berns (1995). Since none of the

European countries outside of the inner circle have “indigenous, non-‐native

varieties” (Berns, 1995: 8), there is no actual outer circle. Instead, in most countries

“English has the role of international language, is generally taught as a foreign

language, and develops as performance varieties among speakers. Learners are

expected to acquire the norms of behavior appropriate to the users of English in the

inner circle” (Berns, 1995: 8).

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However, Berns (1995) argues that some countries, i.e. the Netherlands,

Luxembourg and Germany, do not solely belong to the expanding circle. Especially in

the Netherlands and Luxembourg, English is essential for economic purposes.

Moreover, these countries are more exposed to English media influences than other

expanding circle countries, such as Japan. The use of English in national professional

settings would also characterize them as in-‐between the outer and the expanding

circle. In these countries, however, the use of English is not institutionalized. Berns

(1995) thus characterises these countries as ‘expanding/outer circle’ countries.

While Berns (1995) effectively proves that there is a certain variability in the

expanding circle, it seems unnecessary to resort to an in-‐between category. Several

objections can be put forth. First, it is unclear why countries such as Belgium, in

which the use of English seems similar to that in the Netherlands, belong exclusively

to the expanding circle. The grounds for differentiation thus seem somewhat

inconsistent. Secondly, it seems natural that there is some variability in the use of

English in the expanding circle and that English is more integrated in some countries

than others. However, that this should imply that the more integrated countries

belong in-‐between the outer and expanding circle is unconvincing. Contrary to

actual outer circle countries, the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg do not

have nativized varieties of English any more than Belgium or France do. The need

for such an intermediate circle thus seems unnecessary.

2.1.2 English in Belgium and Flanders

In order to understand the use of English in Flanders, we will first briefly sketch the

linguistic situation in Belgium. The Belgian constitution acknowledges the official

status of Dutch, French and German, though this does not imply that Belgians are all

multilingual. Rather, the Belgian situation is one of territorial multilingualism, where

each language is spoken in a more or less fixed region, i.e. Dutch in Flanders, French

in Wallonia, and German in the Eastern region of Eupen-‐Malmedy. Brussels is a

bilingual region where both French and Dutch are spoken. In 1997, about 61% of the

Belgian population was Dutch-‐speaking, 38% was French-‐speaking and 1% was

German-‐speaking (Goethals, 1997). Goethals (1997) stresses that French is, as much

as English, a foreign language to the Flemish. Without elaborating too much on this

topic, English probably has as much claim to the main mode of interlingual

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communication as French or Dutch. A survey of the European Union1, including

1000 Belgian participants, is equally revealing in this respect. The most important

languages in professional and personal domains (apart from the mother tongue) are

English and French for 82% and 53% of the Belgians, respectively2. 88% of the

Belgians want their children to learn English and 59% think the ideal age for

learning a second language is around 6 to 12 years. Though 77% had learned

languages at school, only 44% believes this is the most efficient way to acquire a

new language. Of the people who report to know English, 24% claims to speak it

very well, 59% speaks it well and 29% has a basic knowledge of English. Since these

figures do not treat the Dutch and French speaking Belgians as separate groups, it is

difficult to evaluate to which extent this situation also separately applies to Flanders

and Wallonia.

Goethals (1997) states that most 13-‐year-‐old Flemish children know about 400

English words without haven taken formal classes, though this has been shown to

depend on the type of secondary education chosen (Lippens, 2010). It seems that

children in the BSO (Vocational Secondary Education) trail behind the TSO

(Technical Secondary Education) and ASO (General Secondary Education) children

in terms of English lexical knowledge before formal instruction. The ASO and TSO

pupils have a more comparable lexical knowledge, though the former are better in

terms of spelling than the latter (Lippens, 2010). The media plays an important role

in acquiring the basics of English. In secondary school, Flemish children get about 2

to 4 hours of English every week in General Secondary Education, depending on the

year and option chosen by the students (Goethals, 1997). After secondary school,

adults can still take language courses in evening classes. Goethals (1997) also notes

that schools (and their teachers) are becoming increasingly embedded in a more

international network.

As for target models of English in secondary education, Goethals (1997) states that

there is no fixed pronunciation standard, though norms are often still referred to.

Although, traditionally, the norm was British Received Pronunciation (RP), the

increasing contact with the USA often leads to an American inflected English

(Goethals, 1997). Even though Goethals’s (1997) account of English in Flanders may

1 Special Eurobarometer 243: Europeans and their Languages, European Commission, February 2006. 2 Note that 38% of the sample were French-‐speaking, 56% were Dutch-‐speaking. It thus seems that French is more important for the Dutch speakers than Dutch for the French speakers.

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be somewhat dated, the general situation has not changed radically since. If

anything, the influence of American English has arguably increased over the passed

few years. It has been argued that this has given rise to a Mid-‐Atlantic English

pronunciation, which introduces General American features in RP (see Simon,

2005). Personal experience has also shown that Flemish children are less familiar

with formal British English (RP) than General American pronunciation. De Meyere

(2010) confirms that pupils in secondary education no longer believe RP to be their

target pronunciation for professional and everyday communication.

2.2 Acquiring a second language

In phonology, Second Language Acquisition has long held a central place in the

literature for a number of reasons. Researchers have tried to address topics such as

phonological maturation (see Best et al., 2001), foreign accent and

comprehensibility (e.g. Munro, 2008). The fundamental questions underlying these

topics pertain to the possibility of second language acquisition: what allows us to

acquire a new language’s phonology? What hurdles have to be overcome? To which

degree can we expect to master a second or third language’s phonology?

2.2.1 Language-‐dependent factors in SLA

The field of SLA has given rise to two important models that try to systematically

describe and predict the dynamics of phonological acquisition, namely the

Perceptual Assimilation Model (henceforth PAM; Best et al., 2001) and the Speech

Learning Model (Flege, 1995).

Best et al.’s (2001) model supposes that speakers consciously and subconsciously

detect information regarding the articulatory gestures that generate sounds. This

information concerns articulatory organs (e.g. glottal stops and nasals), constriction

locations (e.g. lips in labial consonants) and constriction degree (e.g. friction in

fricative consonants) (Best et al., 2001). When perceiving a non-‐native sound, a

speaker may assimilate the sound to his/her L1 phonology in a number of ways: (1)

a non-‐native phone is categorized if it is perceived as an exemplar of a native

phoneme; (2) it is uncategorized if it falls in between two L1 sounds; (3) it is non-‐

assimilable if it does not correspond in any way to native phonemes.

In this model, the perceived distance between the L1 and L2’s phonologies is thus

key in predicting the learnability of L2 sounds. If two L2 sounds are assimilated to

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two different categories (i.e. Two Category assimilation), the speaker is very likely to

perceive the L2 contrast. If one L2 sound is categorized but the other is

uncategorized (or non-‐assimilable), the learner will also be likely to discriminate

between the two sounds. If, however, both sounds are assimilated to the same L1

phoneme (i.e. Single Category assimilation), the speaker’s L1 will prevent the

learner to perceive the contrast. Even if both L2 sounds are perceived as exemplars

of a single L1 phoneme, there may, however, be a difference in ‘category goodness’:

one L2 sound may be a better exemplar of the L1 sound than the other. Finally, both

L2 sounds may also not be assimilable to the L1 system. In this case, the speaker

may still be able to perceptually perceive the non-‐native contrast, since the sounds

are perceived as non-‐speech sounds. For instance, Best et al. (2001) cite the ability

of English speakers to discriminate Zulu clicks, even if these cannot be assimilated to

any English phonemes.

The aforementioned assimilation patterns in PAM (Best et al., 2001) are mostly

indicative of the perceptual assimilation of naïve (or inexperienced) L2 listeners.

The predictions made by PAM may thus be more accurate for short-‐term than for

long-‐term learning. A revised version of PAM, called PAM-‐L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007)

was developed in order to be more applicable to more experienced L2 learners and

hence make more accurate predictions about long-‐term learning. According to PAM-‐

L2, a difference in category goodness may lead to the creation of a new phonological

category. Two L2 sounds may, for instance, be assimilated to the same L1 category

in early stages of L2 learning but differ in category goodness. In this case, PAM-‐L2

predicts that a new phonological and phonetic category may eventually develop for

the most deviant sound. In this way, the L2 contrast is made in later stages of

language learning, even though it was not accurately perceived in earlier stages.

An earlier model that predicts non-‐native speech perception and L2 sound

acquisition is the Speech Learning Model (henceforth SLM; Flege, 1995). The

postulates of SLM are similar to those of PAM-‐L2 in their focus on experienced L2

learners. The model also resembles PAM-‐L2 by stressing the role of the perceptual

distance between native and non-‐native sounds, though it is not as explicit about

assimilation patterns. Flege & Hillenbrand (1984) state that “[j]udging acoustically

different phones to be members of the same category is a fundamental aspect of

human speech perception.” Moreover, Flege (1995) dismisses any strict views on a

phonological (and cognitive) maturation period that would obstruct the creation of

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new L2 phonological categories. On the contrary, he states that “the mechanisms and

processes used in learning the L1 sound system, including category formation,

remain intact over the life span, and can be applied to L2 learning” (Flege, 1995:

239). Instead, problems in the acquisition of non-‐native sounds are more likely to be

caused by perceptual issues. Furthermore, Flege (1995) stresses the role of

experience and age of learning as influences on perception.

However, even if the influence of the L1 is generally accepted, studies have also

attempted to look beyond mother tongue interference in the L2. In a study on the

intelligibility of the English speech of Vietnamese speakers, Cunningham (2009)

remarks that, apart from transfer-‐related issues, the speech of some speakers is

subject to a more general, spontaneous variability. In a similar vein, Bohn (1995:

279) stresses that learners, and especially adults, are “not always language-‐specific

perceivers” (emphasis in original). Contrary to Cunningham (2009), however, Bohn

(1995) focuses on systematic, rather than spontaneous errors. For instance, a

speaker’s interlanguage may be influenced by certain universal phonotactic

preferences that cannot be attributed to the L1 or L2. With regard to vowel

contrasts, they found that Chinese learners of English are able to discriminate vowel

length differences, even if they do not have experience with this feature in their L1.

Bohn (1995) claims that, in contexts where learners are unable to differentiate non-‐

native spectral vowel differences, these spectral cues may be overridden by

durational cues. In other words, Bohn (1995: 300) hypothesizes that “listeners will

increasingly attend to duration differences between vowel pairs as spectral

differences between vowels become smaller.” Still, Bohn (1995) does not disregard

L1 influences, but argues that these tendencies complement any mother tongue

transfer that may occur.

2.2.2 Learner-‐dependent factors in SLA

From the above discussion, it should be apparent that the result of SLA does not only

depend on the dynamics between the L1 and L2 but also on the experience with the

L2. The influence of experience has been accounted for in different ways. For those

situations where a speaker lives in the country where the L2 is spoken, studies have

pointed out the roles of the length of residence (LOR) and the age of arrival (AOA)

(e.g. McAllister, 2001; Meador, Flege & Mackay, 2000). Of these two factors, the

latter has been corroborated the most. McAllister (2001), for instance, found that

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experienced Spanish learners of Swedish with an average LOR of 18 years

pronounced Swedish vowels less accurately than Spanish learners with an average

LOR of 3.6 years. Meador, Flege & Mackay (2000) found that the AOA of learners was

more significant: the earlier the AOA of the speaker, the more accurate his/her L2

pronunciation. Moreover, Flege, Munro & Mackay (1995), found that the effects of

LOR were overruled by the age of learning (AOL) of speakers. Speakers with a

comparable LOR had various proficiency levels depending on their AOL.

Though there is a general consensus that the earlier SLA occurs, the better, the

grounds for this fact have been much debated. Earlier phonological frameworks

have claimed that after a certain age, a so-‐called ‘critical period’, the sensorineural

mechanisms used in attuning our ability to discriminate native speech sounds

mature (Eimas (1975), Aslin and Pisoni (1980) in Best et al., 2001). More recently,

however, it has been acknowledged that new contrasts can be learned during

adulthood. Meador et al. (2000) note the inconsistency of a theory where

neurological maturation prevents some contrasts to be learned but others not. Flege

(1995: 239) even explicitly states that “the mechanisms and processes used in

learning the L1 sound system, including category formation, remain intact over the

life span, and can be applied to L2 learning.” An alternative explanation, that does

not reject the notion of a critical period, is that after this period, the L2 sounds are

more likely to be perceptually assimilated to the L1 phonological system because the

latter is more developed (Meador et al., 2000). This explanation is equally

compatible with the previously discussed PAM (Best et al., 2001) and SLM (Flege,

1995).

2.2.3 Foreign accent, comprehensibility and intelligibility

As indicated above, phonological research in SLA often entails dealing with the

question of foreign accent. The concept of foreign accent has been ill defined (see

Munro, 2008) and is thus often taken for granted. Speech can be said to be produced

with a foreign accent when it deviates from native (though not necessarily standard)

norms. Alternatively, speech with a foreign accent can be defined as speech

containing characteristics that lead listeners to identify it as non-‐native.

The concept thus refers to a perceptual phenomenon, where speech is only

considered to be produced with a foreign accent if listeners perceive it as such. Thus,

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any study attempting to shed a light on the nature of foreign accent, should ideally

complement an acoustic analysis with a perceptual evaluation task.

Views on foreign accent have been varying. Munro (2008), for instance, cites

prescriptivist interpretations of foreign accent, which claim it is “of the nature of

imperfect or defective speech” (Greene & Welles, 1927 in Munro, 2008: 193).

According to Griffen (1980 in Munro, 2008), the goal of second language acquisition

is to attain an accent “free of any indication that the speaker is not a clinically

normal native” (Munro, 2008: 193). However, Munro (2008) states that it is now a

commonly held view that a complete eradication of a foreign accent is not always

possible or necessary. Nevertheless, foreign-‐accented speech has been and still is

extensively discussed in both phonetic-‐phonological and pedagogical literature and

remains one of the key concerns of both language teachers and learners.

As views on foreign accent have become more tolerant – at least in academic circles

–, the discussion has been enriched by the concepts of intelligibility and

comprehensibility. Munro & Derwing (1995: 76) define intelligibility as “the extent

to which a speaker’s message is actually understood by a listener.”

Comprehensibility, then, pertains to whether listeners can identify specific speech

sounds and to how they judge the pronunciation (Floccia, Butler, Goslin & Ellis,

2009). It is not surprising that foreign accent, intelligibility and comprehensibility

are, to a certain extent, interrelated. Munro & Derwing (1995), for instance, found

that native English speech fragments were generally perceived as less accented and

more intelligible than non-‐native fragments. However, the speech of one of their

native speakers was less intelligible than that of their non-‐native participants, even

if it was less accented. In this case, intelligibility may have been impaired by factors

such as speech rate and clarity (Munro & Derwing, 1995). Interestingly, Munro &

Derwing (1995) also found that, while the speech of the non-‐native, Chinese

speakers was often perceived as having a strong foreign accent by native speakers of

English, their productions remained easy to understand (Munro & Derwing, 1995).

Thus, foreign accentedness and intelligibility can also operate independently.

An important difference between comprehensibility and intelligibility are the stages

of lexical processing to which they relate. Comprehensibility pertains to the pre-‐

lexical processing stage, while intelligibility pertains to the post-‐lexical processing

stage (Floccia et al., 2009). As a consequence, impaired comprehensibility may not

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surface in intelligibility ratings, since these are also subject to a top-‐down

interpretation of speech. A listener’s communicational expectations may thus allow

him to understand speech that may be less comprehensible on a purely phonological

level. According to Floccia et al. (2009), comprehensibility may also be influenced by

listener expectations. In their experiment, listeners’ judgements of

comprehensibility were delayed if the speakers were (unexpectedly) changed. A

change from native speech to non-‐native speech impaired comprehensibility, though

this effect was not noted for regional variation (Floccia et al., 2009). Floccia et al.

(2009) found that this disturbance of comprehensibility does not habituate in the

short or long term, though the post-‐lexical processing of speech (and thus of

intelligibility) may improve, “perhaps by applying a specific phonological accent-‐

filter onto the outcome of lexical activation” (Floccia et al., 2009: 402).

More recently, the discussion about intelligibility and comprehensibility has been

extended by a focus on acoustic cues and their weight (e.g. Escudero, 2001;

Escudero et al., 2009; Idemaru & Guion-‐Anderson, 2010). Acoustic cues allow

listeners to perceive sound contrasts. For instance, the contrast between English /ɪ/

and /iː/ is signalled by both spectral cues and durational cues (Escudero, 2001).

These cues may be exploited to different extents in different regional varieties.

Escudero (2001) notes that in Scottish English, for instance, the contrast is made

almost exclusively through the spectral cue. In perception, these differences also

occur as various cues have different ‘weights’. Scottish speakers of English thus

attribute more weight to the spectral cues when discriminating the above-‐

mentioned contrast than Southern speakers of English. The importance of cue

weighting for SLA should not be understated. During L1 acquisition, speakers learn

to attribute weight to the relevant cues of their L1. If the cue weight is differently

distributed in an L2, speakers may have problems correctly identifying L2 contrasts

(Escudero, 2001).

As the focus on foreign accent moves to intelligibility, this is reflected by a change in

attitude towards normative targets. The goal of L2 acquisition emphasizes the

importance of cross-‐linguistic intelligibility, involving varieties of English from all

the concentric circles (see Section 2.1.1). The typical interlocutor of the L2 speaker

of English is thus not necessarily a native speaker of English, since the language is

used “to serve international functions among L2 speakers in international contexts”

(Jenkins, 2000: 16). Jenkins (2000) thus rejects the role of Inner Circle countries as

17

norm dictating and argues in favour of a model based on international

comprehension.

Views regarding the attainment of a native-‐like accent or an intelligibility-‐grounded

target also vary among teachers of English in higher education in Flanders. Some

lecturers believe students should aim for a native-‐like pronunciation. For others,

intelligibility is the main target, since the interlocutors of the students are not

necessarily native speakers themselves (Simon, 2005). These views are also echoed

in the lecturers’ views on the specific target of pronunciation. According to the

former view, the students’ choice of accent ought to be consistent. The latter view,

however, does not stress the need for a ‘pure accent’ (Simon, 2005). Among

university students of English, the target of pronunciation is commonly thought to

be (almost) native-‐like. Simon (2005) argues that this high standard is a way for the

students of English to distinguish themselves from an already high proficiency level

of English among students who do not study English.

2.3 Dutch and English phonology

2.3.1 The Dutch and English vowel systems

Within Europe, Dutch is mainly spoken in the Netherlands (Northern Dutch) and

Belgium (Southern Dutch). Between these Northern and Southern varieties of Dutch,

there are a number of phonological, grammatical and lexical differences not unlike

those observed between the varieties of English. Within Belgium, Dutch is mainly

spoken in the Flemish region and in Brussels. Again, the different regions of

Flanders and Brussels are home to many different accents and dialects. There is a

standard of Belgian Dutch, but often this standard is coloured by the regional

varieties (Booij, 1999). Because of the regional variation in Dutch, a uniform

description of its phonology is often practically impossible. In studies involving

Dutch, it is thus of paramount importance to take into account that the results may

not be generalizable beyond this variety (see also Escudero, Simon & Mitterer, 2012

in Section 2.3.2).

Figure 1 gives an overview of the Standard Northern Dutch vowels. With regard to

the short vowels, the Northern and Southern varieties correspond by and large.

Dutch contains 5 short vowels, /ɪ, ɛ, ɔ, ʏ, ɑ/, and 7 long vowels /i, y, u, e, ø, o, a/. The

Northern and Southern standard varieties also contain 3 diphthongs, /ɛi, œy, ɔu/,

that are not pictured in Figure 1.

18

Figure 1 The Standard Dutch vowels (Booij, 1999: 5)

The difference between the short and long vowels is not merely one of length, but

also of vowel quality. For example, ‘bom’ /bɔm/ (‘bomb’) and ‘boom’ /boːm/ (‘tree’)

differ both in terms of vowels length and vowel quality. Booij (1999) notes vowel

lengths of about 100ms for the short vowels and about 200ms for the long vowels.

Adank, van Hout & Smits (2004) report the formant values and vowel durations in

Table 1 for the Southern Standard Dutch front vowels /ɪ/ and /ɛ/.

Male talkers Female talkers Mean

Vowel F1 F2 Duration F1 F2 Duration F1 F2 Duration /ɪ/ 364 1745 76 455 2115 88 410 1930 82 /ɛ/ 475 1616 86 581 1932 101 528 1774 94 Table 1 F1 and F2 values (in Hz) and duration (in ms) of Southern Standard Dutch vowels

(adapted from Adank et al., 2004)

The situation for English is comparable to that of Dutch in terms of geographical

variation. We shall thus restrict ourselves to a brief overview of the General British

English (see Figure 2) and General American English vowels (see Figure 3).

Figure 2 The British English vowels (Dillon, 2009)

19

Figure 3 The American English vowels (Dillon, 2009)

Since this study will be concerned with the pronunciations of the English front

vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/, let us remark that these have a comparable phonemic value in both

varieties.

Hawkins & Midgely (2005) report formant values of the three front vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/

for male speakers of RP of different ages (see Table 2).

65+ 50-‐55 35-‐40 20-‐25 Mean

Vowel F1 F2 F1 F2 F1 F2 F1 F2 F1 F2

/æ/ 644 1678 693 1579 696 1574 917 1473 738 1576

/ɛ/ 454 1962 489 1920 512 1888 600 1914 514 1921

/ɪ/ 382 2024 341 2074 374 2115 393 2174 373 2097

Table 2 F1 and F2 values of RP vowels in Hz (Hawkins & Midgley, 2005)

2.3.2 The perception and production of the English vowels /ɪ,ɛ,æ/ by Dutch speakers

A comparison of the vowel diagrams in the previous section (Figures 1, 2 and 3)

reveals an asymmetry between the English and Dutch front vowels. Both varieties of

English have an open front vowel /æ/ where Dutch has no such vowel. Previous

studies have identified this asymmetry as a potential problem for speakers of Dutch

learning English (Escudero et al., 2012; Flege, 1992; Wang & van Heuven, 2006).

Flege (1992), for instance, found that the Dutch pronunciation of English /æ/ is

often perceived as /ɛ/ or /ʌ/ by native speakers of both American and British

English. The American and British native speakers, however, were able to identify

the /æ/ correctly 67% and 72% of the time, respectively. Interestingly, the native

speakers’ evaluations of the British English pronunciations of /æ/ were not perfect

either. American native speakers identified the vowel correctly in 85% of the cases.

Surprisingly, native speakers of British English only identified these native vowel

productions correctly 73% of the time. Thus, the Dutch pronunciation of /æ/ was

almost as comprehensible as the British pronunciation for speakers of British

20

English. Flege (1992) puts this down to a methodological difference. The British

participants had a wider choice of vowels than the American participants. A closer

look at the relatively high accuracy of correctly identified Dutch pronunciations of

/æ/ also reveals an effect of degree of foreign accent. The pronunciations of /æ/ by

speakers with a strong foreign accent were significantly less comprehensible than

those by speakers with moderate or mild foreign accents (Flege, 1992).

Even though Dutch has no equivalent /æ/, speakers of Dutch are thus in some cases

able to distinguish /æ/ from other vowels. This observation is equally noted by

Wang & van Heuven (2006: 242), who found that there was a “fair degree of

separation” between the /æ/ and /ɛ/ in the English pronunciation of Dutch speakers

who had not studied English after secondary school. However, these speakers had a

significantly shorter pronunciation of /æ/ than the American pronunciation of the

vowel (Wang & van Heuven, 2006).

It should be noted, however, that the studies by Flege (1992) and Wang & van

Heuven (2006) are concerned with Northern Dutch, not Southern Dutch. The

distinction is relevant, as has been discussed in Section 2.3.1. Though comparative

studies of the perception of English vowels by speakers of different varieties of

Dutch have been few, Escudero et al. (2011) note that different (regional) vowel

pronunciations of Dutch influence the perception of English vowels. More

specifically, speakers of Northern Dutch perceived English /æ/ more often as /ɑ/

than Flemish listeners, while Flemish listeners perceived /ɛ/ more often as /ɪ/ than

their Northern neighbours. Both groups also tended to perceive the English vowel

/æ/ as /ɛ/. Escudero et al. (2011: 8) conclude that “the acoustic (and hence

auditory) properties are important in determining similarity across languages.”

Based on the results of the studies by Flege (1992), Wang & van Heuven (2006) and

Escudero et. al (2011) and on the predictions of the PAM (Best et al., 2001), we

hypothesize that inexperienced Flemish learners of English will assimilate the

English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/ to one category, namely /ɛ/ (Hypothesis 1a, henceforth

H1a). The English /æ/, however, may differ perceptually from the /ɛ/ in terms of

category goodness. Should this be the case, PAM-‐L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007) predicts

that, as they become more experienced, the learners may come to differentiate

between both vowels, as may have been the case in the studies by Flege (1992),

Wang & van Heuven (2006) and Escudero et al. (2011). Of course, for the children to

21

develop a new phonological category for /æ/, they need to be exposed to a more or

less accurate English contrast between /æ/ and /ɛ/.

The pronunciation of the English vowels /ɪ/ and /ɛ/, then, should be less

problematic, since both vowels have a Dutch counterpart. We thus hypothesize that

these English vowels will be assimilated to two different categories (Hypothesis 1b,

henceforth H1b). In sum, the children should be able to distinguish between the

English words ‘bit’ and ‘bet’, but not between ‘bet’ and ‘bat’.

2.4 Methodological consideration

SLA studies on the production of L2 sounds generally gather data using one of three

methods. A survey of the literature on SLA reveals that data is typically elicited

through a reading task, a repetition task or a picture-‐naming task. Though the basic

design of these elicitation methods is quite self-‐explanatory, the different uses of

these tasks suggest that the choice of a methodology is relevant. We will thus outline

some of the basic elements of these methods.

Reading tasks involve a subject reading a word, sentence, or longer utterance (e.g.

Flege & Hillenbrand, 1984; Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2008). Because the intonation

pattern of a sentence may significantly influence a word’s articulation, neutral

carrier phrases (e.g. ‘I say the word ___ again’) are often used in order to neutralize

the effect of prosody (e.g. Major & Kim, 1999). Another important choice in these

studies is whether the elicited words are real words (e.g. Mah & Archibald, 2003) or

not (e.g. Motohashi-‐Saigo & Hardison, 2009), since the use of real words may

influence participants’ pronunciation if the stimuli are frequently occurring words.

Non-‐words allow participants to produce words that have not yet been lexically

encoded. The drawback of this method is that, instead of relying on their own

phonological representation of a word, participants may be influenced by its

orthography. Furthermore, not all phonological possibilities may appear in the same

context. In English, for instance, it would be difficult do elicit the vowels /u/ and /ʊ/

in the same consonantal context, since they often appear in mutually exclusive

contexts (e.g. <boot> /but/, <put>/pʊt/). These issues can be overcome by adding

similar sounding words in the margin, so that the participant can rely on both words

for the intended pronunciation (e.g. Kewley-‐Port, Akhane-‐Yamada & Aikawa, 1996).

For instance, /bʊt/ could then be elicited by adding <put> in the margin.

22

Another way of eliciting data is through a repetition task, in which a word or a

sentence containing the target stimuli is repeated. As with reading tasks, this

method is often carried out using a carrier phrase. The choice between real words

(e.g. Flege et al., 1995) or non-‐words (e.g. Whalen, Best & Irwin, 1997) is also

relevant. Psycholinguistic research has also been interested in the repetition of non-‐

words (e.g. Summers et al., 2010; Windsor, Kohnert, Lobitz & Pham, 2010). Some

studies combine elements from different methods. Flege et al. (1995), for instance,

use a repetition task in which the stimuli are accompanied by a written

representation. If one wishes to study the phonological representation of sounds,

however, the danger exists that the participants imitate a sound they have not yet

encoded. In order to prevent this, some studies have worked with a delay between

the stimulus and the repetition (e.g. Flege & Yeni-‐Komshian, 1999). This ensures

that the speaker relies less on the imitation of the stimuli and more on his/her own

phonological representation. A related issue is that it is difficult to work with accent-‐

neutral stimuli. If one wishes to examine whether learners have an English accent

that is closer to British or American English, for instance, the aural stimuli may guide

the speakers’ pronunciations.

A third common way of eliciting words is through a picture-‐naming task. In this task,

a word is prompted by using a visual representation of the word. The task is

interesting because it directly prompts the participant’s lexical or phonological

representation. While it thus circumvents the potential influence of aural and

orthographical representation, this task also has limitations. In order for the

participant to name a picture, the prompted word should of course be actively

known by the participant. While this especially presents difficulties for the use of

non-‐words (e.g. Matsumoto-‐Shimamori, Ito, Fukuda & Fukuda, 2011), new learners

of a language may not always know the real words either. When using real words,

these should ideally also be intuitively picturable. For this reason, these tasks are

sometimes preceded by a training period, in which the participants acquaint

themselves with the words and their visualizations. Alternative methods include

displaying the picture multiple times. The first time the picture would then be

accompanied by an aural stimulus, so that the participants may learn which word is

intended (e.g. Oh et al., 2011).

While these methods are frequently used, there has been no methodological study

comparing the results obtained by these different tasks. Therefore it is not always

23

clear to what degree the orthography or aural input significantly influences

speakers’ productions. Since few SLA studies have focused on children, it is

especially important to carry out such a methodological comparison for this age

group. This may reveal how to best approach future research in this domain and

avoid methodological pitfalls. Hence, we will compare the results of a reading,

repetition and picture-‐naming task in this study.

If we consider the limitations and advantages of each method, we predict that the

results of each task will differ accordingly. In the reading task, the participants may

try to distinguish English /æ/ from /ɛ/ on the basis of the graphemes <a> (for /æ/)

and <e> (for /ɛ/). We hypothesize that in this case the competing Dutch vowel for

the grapheme <a>, i.e. /ɑ/, may influence the speakers’ pronunciations of the

English vowel /æ/ (Hypothesis 2a, henceforth H2a). Since the repetition task is the

only task in which the speakers are confronted with a native speaker’s

pronunciation, we hypothesize that this pronunciation will influence the learners’

realization of the /æ/ -‐/ɛ/ contrast and allow them to distinguish both sounds

(Hypothesis 2b, henceforth H2b). With regard to the picture-‐naming task, finally,

we hypothesize that the cognitively more challenging design of the task will also

have an effect on the participants’ pronunciation (Hypothesis 2c, henceforth H2c).

3. Experiment 1: Reading

3.1 Methodology

3.1.1 Participants

A group of 10 native speakers of Dutch, 4 male and 6 female, voluntarily participated

in this study. The participants were selected on the basis of a consent form filled out

by their parent(s). The participants were all 12-‐13 years old. They were in their first

year of secondary school and had thus not had English classes at school. The

children all came from the same school in the East-‐Flemish region, around Ghent.

They were all monolingual native speakers of Dutch, apart from a basic knowledge

of French as a foreign language. None of the participants reported having hearing

problems. The three experiments were carried out individually. The children were

told that the experiments would last about 15 minutes. They were also told not to

tell their peers about the procedure of the experiments. They were assured that

none of the gathered data would be used for grades. The experiments were

24

conducted in the same order as they are described here and all took place in the

same setting.

A small questionnaire was carried out in order to gauge the children’s knowledge

and use of English. This questionnaire pointed out that only one of the participants

had previously been to an English-‐speaking country. Three participants had an

English-‐speaking relative, though they met with these at most once a month. All of

the participants’ parents could speak English with various levels of proficiency. One

child’s father, for instance, was an interpreter of English and French and her mother

had studied linguistics. Mostly, however, the parents’ contact with English was

work-‐related. Only four participants had older siblings who could speak English, but

not better than their parents.

Five of the participants claimed to sometimes speak English with their friends or

relatives. For most children, this use of English was limited to some words or

sentences. One participant, however, did have more elaborate conversations once a

month with an aunt who was a native speaker of English.

Unsurprisingly, most of the English input happened through popular media. In

general, most participants sometimes sang songs in English and, in some cases, even

knew them by heart. Almost all of the children watched English television programs

every day, but almost always subtitled. Half of the participants also played English

video games, without Dutch subtitles. Some children had noticed people speaking

English in the bus, or on the street, but not on a regular basis.

3.1.2 Materials

Though this study will only examine the productions of the English vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/,

the vowels /iː, uː, ʌ/ were also included in filler words. Previous studies (see Section

2.3.2) have shown that the vowel set /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ may prove difficult for speakers of

Dutch, since the vowel /æ/ is not part of the Dutch phonological inventory and is

often merged with /ɛ/ in perception and production. These six vowels were

embedded in a /bVt/ context. This context was selected, because plosives have

sharp boundaries with the following or preceding vowel and thus facilitate vowel

analysis. The resulting words (‘bit, bet, bat’) are context-‐neutral, i.e. they are existing

words with the same consonantal context, and the native-‐speaker evaluations (see

Section 3.1.4) will thus not be guided by lexico-‐semantic knowledge. Finally, these

25

words were embedded in the carrier sentence ‘I say ___ again’ in order to neutralize

effects of sentence prosody.

3.1.3 Procedure

For this experiment, the participants were seated in front of a computer screen and

had to wear a microphone (Rode HS1-‐P) plugged into a recorder (Marantz

PMD661). They were instructed, in Dutch, to read a number of sentences that

appeared on the screen at a normal speaking rate. The participants read the

sentences containing the vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ, iː, uː, ʌ/ twice, yielding 120 stimuli in total,

of which 60 were target items. The written stimuli were embedded in the carrier

sentence ‘I say ___ again’. The sentences were displayed in randomized order and

separated by a 5 second interval.

Before the experiment, the children were asked some questions in English so as to

create a more English environment. These questions were asked by a native speaker

of Dutch and concerned the child’s name, age and hobbies. Even though the children

were not required to give elaborate answers, these conversations were assumed to

facilitate their switch from Dutch to English. Only one participant had trouble

answering the questions in English. The recordings were made in a classroom at the

children’s school during their lunch break. This way, the corridors were empty and

background noise was kept to a minimum.

3.1.4 Analysis and evaluation

Afterwards, the context-‐neutral words were cut out of the sentence-‐long stimuli,

analysed acoustically and used in a categorization task. The length, closeness (F1)

and frontness and liprounding (F2) of the vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ were then measured

acoustically in PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2012).

For the categorization task, the accentedness and comprehensibility of 30 of the

stimuli containing the vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ (10 productions per vowel) were evaluated

by four native speakers, so that each vowel was evaluated 40 times. This task also

included the stimuli gathered in Experiments 2 and 3 (see Sections 4 and 5). Four

female native speakers of English participated in the evaluation phase of the

experiments. These native speakers had lived in Belgium for approximately 9

months to 8 years, but did not speak Dutch. Two of them came from the UK, from the

South and the Midlands; the other two participants came from Scotland and the US.

26

All of the participants had travelled frequently and claimed to get in contact with

different (native) accents of English quite often.

The native speakers were instructed to evaluate the pronunciation of a number of

English vowels. First, they had to select the vowel they heard out of a grid containing

the free and checked English vowels /æ, ɑ, ɒ, ɔ, ʌ, ɪ, ɛ, ei, ɜ/. Then, they had to select

how accented the pronunciation of the vowel was on a 9-‐point Likert scale ranging

from ‘no foreign accent’ (1) to ‘very strong foreign accent’ (9). The vowel choice is

interpreted as a rating of comprehensibility. Thus, if the target vowel is selected, this

vowel is believed to be comprehensible; if a non-‐target vowel is selected, the vowel

is coded as incomprehensible. It may, however, also be that the target vowel was

selected, but that the listeners found it difficult to decide which vowel to choose. In

these cases, a high foreign accent may indicate the native speaker’s hesitation in

selecting a vowel. The difference between comprehensibility and accentedness can

thus not fully be conceptualized as the difference between the selection of a vowel

and its goodness rating.

3.2 Results

3.2.1 Acoustic analysis

The reading task yielded 20 instances of each vowel, leading up to a total of 60

vowels. The mean formant values (F1 and F2) and duration for each vowel are

summarized in Table 3.

Vowel F1 (in Hz) F2 (in Hz) Duration (in ms)

/æ/

(N=20)

Mean 697 1629 124

Std. Deviation 101 302 39

/ɛ/

(N=20)

Mean 670 1750 108


/ɪ/

(N=20)

Mean 473 1915 90


Table 3 Reading: mean values and standard deviations of vowels

While the mean F1 values of the vowels /æ/ (F1: 6973) and /ɛ/ (F1: 670) are fairly

similar, the standard deviation is the highest for the /æ/. It may be that this higher

variability reflects the hesitation some of the participants displayed when reading

the grapheme <a>. The vowels /ɛ/ (F2: 1750) and /æ/ (F2: 1629) to differ slightly in 3 Formant values are given in Hz.

27

terms of F2 values. Still, it still seems that the formant values of the /æ/ are not

differentiated enough in order to clearly contrast with those of /ɛ/. The small

acoustic distance between the /ɛ/ and /æ/ productions of the children can also be

seen in Figure 4.

Compared to the formant values for RP /æ/ (F1: 738; F2: 1576) reported by

Hawkins & Midgely (2005), the participants’ pronunciation of /æ/ is surprisingly

similar to the English /æ/. The F1 and F2 values of /ɛ/, on the contrary, are

respectively higher and lower than those of RP /ɛ/ (F1: 514; F2: 1921). In fact, the

participants’ /ɛ/ shows properties more similar to those of /æ/, as can be seen in

Figure 4. The /ɪ/, finally, has a slightly lower mean F2 value but higher F1 value than

the RP /ɪ/ (F1: 373; F2: 2097) reported by Hawkins & Midgely (2005). In fact, Figure

4 shows how the participants’ productions of /ɪ/ are acoustically closer to RP /ɛ/

than /ɪ/.

Figure 4 Reading: vowel diagram for participants (circled) and Hawkins & Midgely (2005)

We find similar data when comparing the participants’ English pronunciation of /ɛ/

and /ɪ/ to the Data for the Standard Dutch vowels. In both cases, the children’s

realizations of /ɛ/ (F1: 670) and /ɪ/ (F1: 473) are more open than the Standard

Dutch realizations of /ɛ/ (F1: 528) and /ɪ/ (F1: 410), as is reflected in the F1 values.

3.2.2 Native speaker evaluation

Table 4 presents the native speakers’ evaluations of the Flemish vowel productions.

æɛ

ɪ

æ

ɛɪ

200

400

600

800

1000

120050010001500200025003000

F2 (Hz)

F1 (H

z)

28

Response Target /ɑ/ /æ/ /ɛ/ /ei/ /ɪ/ /ɒ/ /ʌ/ /ɜ/ /æ/

5 (4.0) 12.5%

19 (3.9) 47.5%

4 (5.8) 10%

0 0 1 (6) 2.5%

10 (4) 25%

1 (6) 2.5%

/ɛ/

2 (5.0) 5%

22 (3.5) 55%

9 (4.4) 22.5%

1 (7) 2,5%

0 0 4 (3.5) 10%

2 (6) 5%

/ɪ/ 0 1 (7) 2.5%

10 (6) 25%

1 (7) 2.5%

23 (3.6) 57.5%

0 3 (6.3) 7.5%

2 (4.5) 5%

Table 4 Reading: count and percentages of native speaker responses and mean accent

ratings (most frequent choices in bold)

Table 4 shows that the native speakers selected a large number of different vowels.

This is not very surprising, since the high standard deviation in the acoustic analysis

suggested that the acoustic properties of the vowels differed significantly for each

target. as was predicted, the vowels /æ/and /ɛ/ are perceived similarly. What is

surprising is that they are both perceived as /æ/ rather than /ɛ/ in half of the cases.

However, we already noted that the formant values for these two vowels were more

similar to RP /æ/ than /ɛ/.

For /æ/, the second most common response is /ʌ/ (25%). It is possible that, because

of the high variation in F1 and F2 values, some tokens were more central variants,

resembling the vowel /ʌ/. The target vowel /æ/ is less frequently perceived as /ɑ/

(12.5%) and /ɛ/ (10%). In terms of accentedness, it seems that the three most

frequent vowel choices were perceived as less accented than the less frequent

choices. However, the target /æ/ is never perceived as a native English vowel

production, regardless of the native speakers’ responses.

The /ɛ/ was most frequently perceived as /æ/ (55%), and this is equally the least

accented vowel, together with /ʌ/ (10%). The acoustic analysis showed that there

was a slight difference between the vowels /æ/and /ɛ/. This is also reflected in the

vowel choices for these two vowels. Apart from the most frequent choice for /æ/,

target /æ/ is perceived more often as /ɑ/, while target /ɛ/ tends to be perceived as

/ɛ/ (22.5%) more often. For those cases where the opposite is true, the vowels have

a higher accentedness rating.

Finally, the /ɪ/ is most frequently perceived as /ɪ/ (57.5%), as expected. This is at

the same time also the least accented choice. The /ɪ/ is also commonly perceived as

/ɛ/ (25%), but this vowel is already perceived as very accented. As with the

previous target vowels, the participants sometimes also perceived the more central

vowel /ʌ/ (7.5%).

29

In sum, the evaluations of the vowels from the reading task are clustered in

important ways. While both /æ/and /ɛ/ are clustered around /æ/, each seems to

deviate in its own way. The target vowel /ɪ/, then, is the only vowel that is perceived

accurately in more than half of the cases.

Table 5 summarizes the mean accentedness ratings for the target vowels. The

accentedness ratings for the /æ/ and /ɪ/ are both higher for the comprehensible

vowels than for the incomprehensible ones, though the difference is clearly more

marked for the /ɪ/. This suggests that the /ɛ/ and, to a lesser extent, the /æ/ have

more competing vowels, since the accentedness ratings of the incomprehensible

choices are similar or lower to those of the comprehensible choices. This is the most

striking for /ɛ/, where incomprehensible choices are less accented than

comprehensible ones. From Table 4, we could already surmise that the target vowel

/ɛ/ has a tendency to be perceived as /æ/.

Target vowel Mean accent rating N %

/æ/ Incomprehensible 4.52 21 52.5% Comprehensible 3.89 19 47.5%

/ɛ/ Incomprehensible 3.90 31 77.5% Comprehensible 4.44 9 22.5%

/ɪ/ Incomprehensible 6.00 17 42.5% Comprehensible 3.57 23 57.5%

Table 5 Reading: mean accent ratings for target vowels

A statistical correlation analysis equally confirmed the strong relation between

comprehensibility and accentedness for the /ɪ/. Comprehensible targets tend to be

significantly less accented than incomprehensible targets (r(40) = -‐0.635, p < 0.001).

No such correlation was observed for /ɛ/ and /æ/.

3.2.3 Statistical analysis

Next, we will examine the influence of the acoustic weight of the F1 and F2 values,

and the duration of the vowels on their comprehensibility and accentedness. A

statistical correlation analysis revealed that the comprehensibility of the target

vowel /æ/ was only significantly influenced by the F2 values of the vowels (r(40) =

0.388, p < 0.05). Specifically, the higher the F2 value of the /æ/, the more

comprehensible it was.

For the vowel /ɛ/, vowel duration was found to influence the comprehensibility of

the vowel (r(40) = 0.332, p < 0.05). Longer instances of the vowel were thus found to

30

be more comprehensible. Moreover, the F1 value of this vowel also influenced

accentedness (r(40) = -‐0.355, p < 0.05), but not comprehensibility. Vowels with

higher F1 values were less accented but not necessarily more comprehensible.

The F2 values of the /ɪ/, finally, significantly influenced both accentedness and

comprehensibility. Vowels with higher F2 values were both more comprehensible

(r(40) = 0.332, p < 0.05) and less accented (r(40)= -‐0.313, p < 0.05).

The influence of the acoustic properties on vowel accentedness should always be

interpreted on the basis of the vowels’ comprehensibility. In Table 4, it was revealed

that the least accented vowels for /ɛ/ were not the most comprehensible ones. Thus,

because the /æ/ is the least accented vowel choice for /ɛ/, the influence on

accentedness bears on the perceived vowel /æ/, not /ɛ/. In this case, instances of

/ɛ/ with a higher F1 value were perceived as /æ/ with a lower accentedness.

3.3 Discussion

The data from the reading task indicate several important tendencies. First, the

acoustic analysis of the vowels showed that the children’s vowel productions of

English /æ/ and /ɛ/ were acoustically more similar to RP /æ/ than /ɛ/. On first

sight, this is surprising, since descriptions of Dutch tend to agree that the Dutch

vowel in ‘bed’ is an /ɛ/, rather than an /æ/ (e.g. Booij, 1999). However, the Dutch

variety spoken in East-‐Flanders is well known for having a more open pronunciation

of the vowel /ɛ/ (see Collins & Vandenbergen, 2000).

A comparison with the data from Adank et al. (2004) revealed that this vowel was

indeed realized with a higher F1 value. Moreover, the data suggested that the

participants’ realization of /ɛ/ was acoustically closer to RP /æ/ than /ɛ/. These

findings were corroborated by the native speaker evaluation. In the majority of the

cases, both vowels were perceived as /æ/. Note, however, that both vowels were

comprehensible in less than half of the cases and received relatively high accent

ratings.

Secondly, the participants’ productions of the vowel /ɪ/ were found to be

acoustically close to English /ɛ/. Compared to the Standard Dutch pronunciation, the

children’s pronunciation would also have been more open in Dutch. In the native

speaker evaluations, this vowel was also often perceived as /ɛ/, although it received

high accent ratings. In consequence, the vowel was only comprehensible in 57% of

31

the cases. Furthermore, a statistical analysis revealed that instances of /ɪ/ with

higher F2 values were more comprehensible and less accented. This is not

surprising, since these instances are acoustically more distant from RP /ɛ/.

In sum, the data suggested that there is indeed a merger of the English vowels /æ/

and /ɛ/ in the pronunciation of the children. While the vowel /ɪ/ was

comprehensible in the majority of the cases, it is also often perceived as a more

accented realization of /ɛ/. Moreover, the vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ were realized with

higher F1 values than in RP vowels. Possibly, this could be a transfer from the

children’s regional accent. Even though the reading task did not seem challenging

for the children, we have noted a significant degree of variation in the pronunciation

of the vowels that was also reflected in the evaluation task.

4. Experiment 2: Repetition

4.1 Methodology

4.1.1 Participants

The participants in Experiment 2 were the same as those in Experiment 1.

4.1.2 Materials

This experiment was designed to elicit the same vowels as in Experiment 1, i.e. the

vowel set /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ and the filler vowels /iː, uː, ʌ/ in a /bVt/ context.

4.1.3 Procedure

A female native speaker of (Southern) British English was instructed to read the list

of carrier phrases from the reading task twice at a normal speaking rate. Thus, in

total, 12 sentences containing the words ‘bit’, ‘bet’, ‘,bat’, ‘beat’, ‘boot’, ‘but’ were

recorded for the repetition task. The native speaker had lived in Belgium for about 2

years but had not taken any courses in Dutch and used only English both at work

and at home. The recordings were made in a silent room, using a portable recorder

(Marantz PMD661) and a headset microphone (Rode HS1-‐P).

In Experiment 2, the 12 stimuli were played to the 10 participants through

headphones (B&W P-‐5) that were superimposed on the microphone. The children

were told that they would hear some English sentences and had to repeat them after

a two-‐second pause. This pause was used in order to reduce the possible effects of

imitation. The stimuli were played in randomized order. The instructions were

32

provided in Dutch in order to ensure that the participants understood the task. In

those cases where a participant’s answer was unclear and was told to repeat his/her

answer, the participant was told only his/her last answer would be analysed.

Experiment 2 yielded 120 stimuli in total, of which 60 were target words, or 20

productions per vowel. The repetition task was carried out immediately after the

reading task.


The 60 target sentences were processed, analysed and evaluated in the same way as

in Experiment 1. As in the Experiment 1, half of the stimuli, i.e. 10 per vowel, were

evaluated by the native speakers.

When repeating the stimuli, some of the participants tended to pronounce the final

consonant /t/ differently. In some cases, this consonant resembled a fricative. One

participant pronounce the stimuli as /bɪχt/, /bɛχt/ and /bæχt/. Probably, the

participant interpreted the period of voicelessness following as a /h/, but

pronounced is as /χ/. Since the native speakers were asked to focus only on the

vowel, these stimuli were included in the categorization task.

4.2 Results


In the repetition task, 60 target words were elicited, yielding 20 instances of each

vowel. Table 6 presents the mean F1 and F2 values and the durations of these

vowels.


/æ/ (N=20)

Mean 754 1513 123 Std. Deviation 105 245 21

/ɛ/ (N=20)


/ɪ/ (N=20)


Table 6 Repetition: mean values and standard deviations of vowels

The vowels differ in some respects from those elicited in the reading task. The most

striking difference is the lower mean F2 value for /æ/. This is reflected in the clearer separation of /æ/ and /ɛ/ in Figure 5, compared to Figure 4. The standard

deviation of the /æ/ is also lower than in the reading task.

33

Compared to Hawkins & Midgely’s (2005) data, the Flemish participants’ /æ/ is

more or less similar to the native speakers’ realization of this vowel (F1: 738; F2:

1576). The vowel /ɛ/ has higher mean F1 values and lower F2 values and is

acoustically more similar to English /æ/, as can be seen in Figure 5. The analysis of

/ɪ/, finally, shows higher F1 values but similar F2 values in comparison to its RP

pronunciation (F1: 373; F2: 2097). The participants’ productions of /ɪ/ are

acoustically in-‐between the native speakers’ realizations of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/, but closer to

/ɪ/ than in the reading task.

Figure 5 Repetition: vowel diagram for participants (circled) and Hawkins & Midgely

(2005)


The native speaker evaluations for the repetition task vowels can be seen in Table 7.

Response Target /ɑ/ /æ/ /ɛ/ /ei/ /ɪ/ /ɔ/ /ɒ / /ʌ/ /ɜ/ /æ/ 15 (4.1)

37.5% 10 (5.5)

25% 3 (5.7) 7.5%

1 (7.0) 2.5%

0 4 (7.5) 10%

1 (4.0) 2.5%

4 (3.8) 10%

2 (6.0) 5%

/ɛ/ 2 (7.0) 5%

20 (3.6) 50%

7 (5.9) 17.5%

2 (8.0) 5%

0 0 0 3 (4.3) 7.5%

6 (4.9) 15%

/ɪ/ 0 0 9 (5.1) 22.5%

1 (9.0) 2.5%

29 (3.9) 72.5%

1 (8.0) 2.5%

0 0 0

Table 7 Repetition: count and percentages of native speaker responses and mean accent

ratings (most frequent choices in bold)

These evaluations show that the clearer differentiation between /æ/ and /ɛ/ that

was revealed in the acoustic analysis is also reflected here. The resulting split is,

æɛ

ɪ

æ

ɛɪ

200

400

600

800

1000

120050010001500200025003000

F2 (Hz)

F1 (H

z)

34

however, not more accurate: /ɛ/ is again often perceived as /æ/ (50%) and target

/æ/ tends to be perceived as /ɑ/ (37.5%).

This is not entirely surprising, since the acoustic analysis also showed that it was

mostly the target vowel /æ/ that was pronounced differently in the repetition task.

The evaluation of the reading task vowels already indicated that the /æ/ also tended

to be perceived as /ɑ/ (12.5%) and we observe this same tendency in the repetition

task. It is also worth noting that those times where the target vowel /æ/ was

perceived as /æ/, it is also more accented (5.5) than in the reading task (3.9).

The evaluation of the vowel /ɛ/, then, is similar to that of the reading task. The most

frequent vowel choice was again /æ/ (50%), and this was equally perceived as the

least accented one.

The /ɪ/ was perceived more accurately (72.5%) than in the reading task evaluations

(57.5%). Again, the /ɛ/ is the second most frequent (22.5%), but more accented

choice.

Table 8 presents the mean accentedness ratings for the comprehensible and

incomprehensible vowels.

Target vowel Accentedness N %

/æ/ Incomprehensible 4.87 30 75.0% Comprehensible 5.50 10 25.0%

/ɛ/ Incomprehensible 4.33 33 82.5% Comprehensible 5.86 7 17.5%

/ɪ/ Incomprehensible 5.73 11 27.5% Comprehensible 3.89 29 72.5%

Table 8 Repetition: mean accent ratings for target vowels

For both /æ/ and /ɛ/, the comprehensible vowel choices are perceived as more

accented than the incomprehensible ones. This is not entirely surprising,

considering the data from Table 7, which shows that these vowels were most

commonly perceived as /ɑ/ and /æ/, respectively. The /ɪ/, however, is still

perceived as less accented when it is comprehensible. As a consequence, we only

found a correlation between comprehensibility and accentedness for the /ɪ/ (r(40) =

-‐0.408, p < 0.05).

35


A statistical analysis of the acoustic data and the evaluations revealed that the

comprehensibility of the vowel /ɛ/ was influenced by the vowel’s duration (r(40) =

0.345, p < 0.05). Longer vowels were more comprehensible than shorter ones.

Vowel duration also had a significant influence on the perceived accentedness of the

vowel /ɪ/ (r(40) = 0.343, p < 0.05). In this case, the longer the vowel was, the more

accented it was.

4.3 Discussion

The acoustic analysis and categorization task revealed that the data from the

repetition task were different from those of the reading task. Most markedly, the

vowel merger of /æ/ and /ɛ/ observed in the reading task is not as clear in the

repetition task. Instead, we find a split in both the acoustic properties of the vowels

and their evaluations. However, this split is not the target one, as it is realized (or

perceived) as a contrast between /ɑ/ and /æ/.

One of the drawbacks of a repetition task is that the participants may be inclined to

imitate the stimuli, rather than rely on their own pronunciations. Yet, these data

suggest that the participants did not merely imitate the stimuli. If this were the case,

one would have expected values for /ɛ/ that were different from the reading task,

while these were the most similar to those of the reading task. It thus seems that the

participants relied on the same phonemic category as in the reading task for this

vowel. It may be that the participants perceived a difference between the stimuli for

/ɛ/ and /æ/ and tried to differentiate these vowels by pronouncing the latter as /ɑ/.

This would be plausible, since the /ɑ/ is equally part of their L1 (Dutch) inventory. It

thus appears that there is an influence from the aural stimuli of the repetition task,

but this manifested itself differently than expected.

Still, the /ɛ/-‐/æ/ contrast is not necessarily inherent to the children’s phonemic

system, since the split was not as strong in the reading task stimuli. Rather, it may be

the result of the children’s reliance on their L1 to perceive the vowels. In other

words, the observation that the participants perceived and reproduced a distinction

between /ɛ/ and /æ/, does not imply that they would have encoded this difference

in their phonological representations of <bet> and <bat>.

36

With regard to the pronunciation of the vowel /ɪ/, the data revealed that it was

acoustically more similar to the RP pronunciation of the vowel than in the reading

task. Possibly, the native speaker’s realization of /ɪ/ influenced the children’s

pronunciation. In consequence, the vowel was more comprehensible in the

repetition task.

The data from the repetition task were also similar to that of the reading task in a

number of respects. First, even the least accented vowel choices were never

perceived as native. The vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/ elicited in the repetition task were even

less comprehensible than those from the reading task, though the /ɪ/ was more

comprehensible. Secondly, the data also suggest a high degree of variation in the

pronunciation. In the acoustic analysis, this was reflected by the variation of the

vowels’ acoustic properties. In consequence, the native speakers perceived a high

number of different vowels. The vowel /æ/, however, was produced more

consistently in terms of F2 value and duration than in the reading task. If the greater

variation of these properties in the reading task may be put down to linguistic

insecurity caused by the orthographic input, then the smaller variation in the

repetition task may be explained in the same way. Without the potential influence of

the ambiguous grapheme <a>, the participants may have been more able to imitate

the speaker’s pronunciation more accurately.

We can thus conclude that, in contrast to the reading task, the aural stimuli from the

repetition task may have brought about a vowel contrast in the children’s

pronunciation of /ɛ/ and /æ/. The nature of this contrast further confirmed the

tendency observed in the reading task analysis, that if a contrast between /ɛ/ and

/æ/ is produced, the vowels are realized as /æ/ and /ɑ/, respectively.

5. Experiment 3: Picture-‐naming

5.1 Methodology

5.1.1 Participants

The participants for Experiment 3 were the same as those in Experiments 1 and 2.

5.1.2 Materials

Since the design of Experiment 3 differs from the previous two experiments, other

stimuli were elicited. First, the experiment was restricted to the three vowels /ɪ, ɛ,

37

æ/, because including filler vowels would unnecessarily complicate and lengthen the

experiment. Secondly, apart from ‘bit, bet, bat’, six other words containing the same

vowels but different consonants were used (i.e. ‘pig, pink, red, bed, cat, hat’; see

Appendix A). These words were monosyllabic words that the children were likely to

know on the basis of a previous study (Simon, Sjerps & M., to appear). Since this

experiments also had a Dutch training phase, 10 monosyllabic Dutch words were

used for this part (e.g. ‘ster, zon’, see Appendix B). The cognates of these Dutch

words were avoided for the English part.

5.1.3 Procedure

The goal of Experiment 3 was to probe the phonological representations of the

participants without potential influences from orthographical input (as in

Experiment 1) or phonetic input (as in Experiment 2). This, however, presented two

problems. First, the target words had to be actively known by the children. Secondly,

the target words also had to be intuitively picturable. Alternatively, these issues

could be overcome by using a pre-‐test training period. For practical reasons, this

was not possible in the framework of the present study4.

One solution to these problems is to work with a delayed repetition (see Tsukada et

al., 2005). In such a task, each target word would be pictured and elicited several

times with an aural stimulus being played during the first elicitation. The

subsequent elicitations are then assumed to be less reliant on this aural stimulus

and thus more representative of the participant’s phonological representation. For

the present study, however, delayed repetition does not prove very practical. First,

this kind of test resembles the repetition task, since both tasks require the repetition

of an aural stimulus. Secondly, there may be an asymmetry between words that the

participants know, and for which the aural stimulus is superfluous, and words for

which the stimulus is necessary.

Hence, a third and hitherto unexplored method, which consists of two parts, is used

in this experiment. First, the participant has to name a picture s/he sees on a

computer screen. The pictured word is a basic English word (see Section 5.1.2)

containing the vowel /ɪ/, /ɛ/ or /æ/. Then, the participant has to transfer the vowel

of this word to the context-‐neutral /bVt/. For instance, upon seeing a picture of a 4 A picture-‐naming task with a training period has the advantage of being less cognitively challenging during the experiment. Still, if such a training period is not possible, this experiment may prove an interesting alternative to delayed repetition tasks.

38

cat, the participant would say ‘cat sounds like bat’. This way, the participant

produces the context-‐neutral target without aural or orthographical stimuli.

Because the design of the experiment was more complex than that of Experiments 1

and 2, the children first completed a similar test in Dutch. This test used 10 basic

Dutch words, containing the Dutch vowels /u, a, ɑ, ɪ, o, ɔ, ɛ/ (see Appendix B). The

participants were instructed that they would see a number of pictures and had to

repeat the vowel in the sentence ‘___ klinkt als bVt’ (‘___ sounds like bVt’). The

experimenter then went over the pictures with the children in order to ensure that

they knew the corresponding words. In general, the participants had little problem

understanding the test and made few mistakes by the second or third illustration.

After completing the experiment in Dutch, the children were told that they now had

to repeat the exercise in English. In order to ensure that they knew the English

words, the experiment went over each picture with them. In many cases, the

children knew the pictured words. Some children did not know the word ‘pig’,

others only had to be reminded of some of the other words. Only one participant did

not know the majority of the words. In these cases, the experimenter told the

participants the target words and asked them to repeat them until they were certain

they knew them. Once the actual experiment started, the participants had no

problem remembering the words.

For the English part, the number of vowels was reduced to the three target vowels

/ɪ, ɛ, æ/. Each vowel was represented by two different illustrated words. This

yielded 6 picturable, context-‐dependent words and 6 context-‐neutral words per

participant, for a total of 60 context-‐dependent and 60 context-‐neutral words, or 40

productions per vowel. They were told that they had to use the English sentence ‘___

sounds like bVt’. If the participants hesitated over an answer, they were asked to

repeat that sentence, though this was rarely necessary. The experiment was

conducted in the same setting as the previous experiments.

Even though this experiment is more cognitively challenging than Experiments 1

and 2, it is worth testing because it provides an alternative to the use of a delayed

repetition. The complexity of the task is also reduced by using a Dutch training test.

It seemed that the participants easily understood the design of the experiment.

Furthermore, the participants were already more familiar with the target words

since they had already come across them in Experiments 1 and 2.

39


The 60 context-‐neutral and 60 context-‐dependent words were extracted from the

sentences, processed and acoustically analysed in the same way as for Experiments

1 and 2. The native speakers evaluated 30 of the context-‐neutral words.

In total, 240 words were elicited and analysed in the three experiments. Of these

240 elicitations, 90 were also evaluated by native speakers.

5.2 Results


Table 9 presents the acoustic properties of the vowels of the 60 context-‐neutral and

60 context-‐dependent words.

Taking both groups of words together, the /æ/ and /ɛ/ are again quite similar in

terms of formant values and duration, though the mean F1 and F2 of /æ/ are slightly

higher. Consequently, the contrast between both vowels is minimal (see Figure 6).

Turning to the standard deviations of these values, it seems that the /æ/ and /ɛ/ are

realized with a similar consistency. The F2 values of the /ɪ/, however, show more

variation.

Vowel F1 (in Hz) F2 (in Hz) Duration (in ms) /æ/ (N=40)


/ɛ/ (N=40)


/ɪ/ (N=40)


Table 9 Picture-‐naming: mean values and standard deviations of vowels

The most important difference between these results and those from the previous

tasks are the vowel durations. The vowels elicited in this task are at least 20 ms

longer than those from the other tasks. This may be partly explained by the sentence

context in which the words were elicited. In the picture-‐naming task, the target

words were either in initial or final position. This different prosodic context might

have influenced the duration of the vowels. The design of the task could also have

influenced the vowel durations. Since this task was more cognitively taxing than the

previous two tasks, it is possible that the participants hesitated more when

pronouncing the target words, leading to a slower speech rate and longer vowel

40

durations. However, even if the complexity of the task influenced the vowel

durations, the vowel durations of /æ/ and /ɛ/ are comparable and longer than the

/ɪ/, as in the other tasks. Moreover, the standard deviation of these durations (26-‐31

ms) is comparable to that of the reading task (23-‐39 ms). If hesitation were the main

cause of longer durations, one would expect more diverging results.

Figure 6 Picture-‐naming: vowel diagram for participants (circled) and Hawkins & Midgely

(2005)

In comparison to Hawkins & Midgely’s (2005) data, the formant values for the

vowels /æ/ and /ɛ/ are again more similar to English /æ/ (F1: 738; F2: 1576) than

to /ɛ/ (F1: 514; F2: 1921), though the F1 and F2 values are slightly higher. The

values for /ɪ/, then, are comparable in terms of F2 values, but the mean F1 value is

again higher, so that it is acoustically closer to RP /ɛ/ than /ɪ/. As in the reading task,

the vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ were also realized with higher F1 values than in Standard

Dutch.

Since the design of the picture-‐naming task requires the vowels realized in the

context-‐dependent words to be transferred to the context-‐neutral words, we will

also compare these two categories (Table 10).

æɛ

ɪ

æ

ɛɪ

200

400

600

800

1000

120050010001500200025003000

F2 (Hz)

F1 (H

z)

41


Context-‐dependent

/æ/ (N=20)


/ɛ/ (N=20)


/ɪ/ (N=20)


Context-‐neutral

/æ/ (N=20)


/ɛ/ (N=20)


/ɪ/ (N=20)


Table 10 Comparison: mean values and standard deviations of vowels

While the mean formant values vary slightly between both groups (F1 values tend to

be higher for the pictured words), it seems that the difference between /æ/ and /ɛ/

on the one hand and /ɪ/ on the other hand is similar. Even the small difference

between /æ/ and /ɛ/ is maintained. The durations of the vowels are slightly higher

for context-‐neutral /æ/ and /ɛ/, but not for /ɪ/. A potential reason for this might

again be the prosodic influence of the sentence. Since the difference between the

different vowels is maintained, it thus seems that the participants were indeed able

to transfer the vowel from the pictured word to the context-‐neutral word.


Table 11 presents the native speakers’ evaluations of the vowels from the picture-‐

naming task. As in the reading task, the /æ/ is rarely perceived as /ɑ/ (2.5%), but

more frequently perceived as /ɛ/ (17.5%). It is still most often perceived as /æ/

(60%), though, and is then the least accented vowel.

For /ɛ/, the most commonly perceived vowel is again /æ/ (45%) and this vowel also

received the lowest accentedness rating. Those times when it is perceived as /ɛ/

(22.5%), it was also judged to be more accented.

The /ɪ/, finally, is comprehensible in about half of the cases (52.5%) and received a

remarkably low accentedness rating (2.9). The second most commonly perceived

vowel here is the /ɛ/ (32.5%), though it is already deemed more accented in this

case (5.2).

42

Response Target /ɑ/ /æ/ /ɛ/ /ei/ /ɪ/ /ɔ/ /ɒ/ /ʌ/ /ɜ/ /æ/ 1 (5.0)

2.5% 24 (4.0)

60% 7 (5.0) 17.5%

1 (8.0) 2.5%

0 0 0 1 (6.0) 2.5%

6 (4.7) 15%

/ɛ/ 3 (6.0) 7.5%

18 (3.6) 45%

9 (5.0) 22.5%

1 (7.0) 2.5

0 1 (6.0) 2.5%

1 (5.0) 2.5%

2 (7.5) 5%

5 (4.0) 12.5%

/ɪ/ 0 1 (6.0) 2.5%

13 (5.2) 32.5%

0 21 (2.9) 52.5%

0 0 4 (7.0) 10%

1 (4.0) 2.5%

Table 11 Picture-‐naming: count and percentages of native speaker responses and mean

accent ratings (most frequent choices in bold)

The mean accentedness ratings in Table 12 reveal a similar pattern to that in the

reading task, except that the /æ/ is slightly more comprehensible and the /ɪ/

slightly less comprehensible in the picture-‐naming task.

Target vowel Accentedness N %

/æ/ Incomprehensible 5.13 16 40.0%

Comprehensible 4.04 24 60.0%

/ɛ/ Incomprehensible 4.39 31 77.5%


/ɪ/ Incomprehensible 5.58 19 47.5%


Table 12 Picture-‐naming: mean accent ratings for target vowels

The accentedness ratings for this task are higher for both /æ/ and /ɛ/, though the

/ɪ/ is the least accented in this task. A statistical correlation analysis showed that

comprehensible instances of /æ/ and /ɪ/ tended to be less accented. This correlation

was stronger for /ɪ/ (r(40) = -‐0.657, p < 0.01) than for /æ/ (r(40 = -‐0.317, p < 0.05).

This suggest that, for these two vowels, the target vowel is the most valid choice,

while for /ɛ/, the /æ/ seems to be the most valid (or unaccented) choice.


A statistical correlation analysis revealed a number of patterns of influence for the

vowels from the picture-‐naming task. The F1 value of the /æ/ significantly

influenced vowel comprehensibility (r(40) = 0.472, p < 0.01). Higher F1 values thus

increased the comprehensibility of the vowel.

43

A similar effect was noted for the accentedness of /ɛ/ (r(40) = -‐0.373, p < 0.05). In

this case, the vowel was less accented if its F1 value was higher. Longer instances of

the vowel, however, were judged more accented (r(40) = 0.381, p < 0.05).

For the /ɪ/, then, higher F1 values also made the vowel less accented to the native

speakers (r(40) = -‐0.313, p < 0.05).

5.3 Discussion

One of the presuppositions that lay behind the design of the picture-‐naming task is

that the children should be able to transfer the vowel from the context-‐dependent

words to the context-‐neutral words. The similar acoustic properties of these two

groups of words revealed that the vowels were indeed similar and that it can thus be

assumed that the vowel was transferred from one word to the other. We also

noticed that the vowel durations were slightly longer than in the previous tasks.

Most importantly, however, the contrast between /æ/ and /ɛ/ in the repetition task

is not found in the picture-‐naming task, as both vowels are perceived as /æ/.

As in the reading task, the participants’ realization of /ɪ/ was acoustically similar to

RP /ɛ/ and this was reflected in the native speakers’ categorization of the vowel.

Since the participants’ productions of the English vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ are more open

than the corresponding Dutch vowels, it is possible that the children’s East-‐Flemish

accent influenced their English productions.

It thus seems that the data gathered for this task are more similar to those of the

reading task than to those of the repetition task. Except that the /æ/ was slightly

more comprehensible in this task, and the /ɪ/ slightly less comprehensible, the /æ/

and /ɛ/ were generally more accented and the /ɪ/ was significantly less accented.

6. General discussion

In the previous sections, we have described the data from the reading, repetition

and picture-‐naming tasks in order to answer our main research questions. First, we

shall address the question whether the participants were able to realize the English

vowels /ɪ/, /ɛ/ and /æ/ by examining the data from the acoustic analyses (Section

6.1) and the native speaker evaluations (Section 6.2). Secondly, we shall turn to the

issue of which of the data elicitation methods might be most suited for research into

accentedness and comprehensibility (Section 6.3).

44

6.1 Participants’ realization of /ɪ, ɛ, æ/

The acoustic analyses of the data gathering methods revealed two important points.

First, the pronunciation of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ in the reading and picture-‐naming task was

more open than in RP and Standard Dutch. In fact, the vowels /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ were

acoustically more similar to the RP vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/, respectively. We have

already suggested that the children relied on these more open pronunciations in

their regional Dutch accent. If this should be the case, there is a transfer of their L1

vowels to the English vowels. In order to verify this claim, the regional

pronunciation of children of the Dutch vowels /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ should be examined. Still,

evidence for an open pronunciation of the /ɛ/ is, for instance, noted by Collins and

Vandenbergen (2000: 47), who state that “[s]ome Flemish dialects have a very open

vowel /ɛ/ which sounds more like [English] /æ/”.

Evidence for such a transfer was not as clear in the data from the repetition task.

While the /ɛ/ from this task is also acoustically more similar to RP /æ/ than /ɛ/, the

participants’ /ɪ/ was acoustically closer, though not identical, to RP /ɪ/ than in the

other tasks. These different results could be interpreted as an influence of the aural

stimuli on the children’s pronunciation. Upon repeating the aural stimuli, the

children may have imitated the slightly more closed pronunciation of the native

speaker’s /ɪ/.

Secondly, the participants’ realizations of /æ/ were acoustically similar to their

realizations of /ɛ/ in the reading and picture-‐naming tasks. Thus, their

pronunciation of the English vowel /æ/ was similar to RP /æ/, since their

realization of /ɛ/ was also similar to RP /æ/. In other words, the English phonemes

/ɛ/ and /æ/ are merged in the children’s pronunciation and are acoustically more

similar to RP /æ/ than /ɛ/.

The exact nature of this merger, however, is less clear. From a phonetic perspective,

the vowels are closer to [æ] than [ɛ], but descriptions of Dutch (e.g. Booij, 1999)

generally agree that Dutch phonology does not contain a phoneme /æ/. If we

consider that, because of their regional pronunciation, the participants’ /ɛ/ is

realized as [æ] (or [ɛ̝]) in Dutch and English, the phonemic value of this vowel

remains /ɛ/. From a phonological point of view, it seems the vowels are merged to

/ɛ/. We shall return to this matter in Section 6.2.

45

While the data from the repetition task did not reveal a merger of /ɛ/ and /æ/, they

did not contradict the findings from the reading and picture-‐naming tasks either.

The children’s realizations of the /ɛ/ in this task remained comparable to those in

the other task, that is, they were acoustically similar to RP /æ/. Their realizations of

English /æ/, however, were more open than those of /ɛ/, so that the vowels were

contrasted. Since Escudero et al. (2011) have pointed out that, to some extent, adult

speakers of Dutch are able to perceptually distinguish between English /ɛ/ and /æ/,

it is possible that, in this study, the participants also perceived a difference between

these vowels and tried to produce this difference.

If the children perceived English /ɛ/ as Dutch /ɛ/ and realized it as [æ] and English

/æ/ was perceived as different from /ɛ/, the speakers could not rely on their [æ]

realization of this vowel. If the learners (unconsciously) interpreted English /æ/ as

more open than /ɛ/, they would thus have to make their pronunciations [æ] more

open. A study on the perception of English vowels is needed to verify whether

children are able to perceive the /ɛ/-‐/æ/ contrast.

The fact that the data of the repetition task differ from those of the reading and

picture-‐naming tasks might be explained by the nature of the repetition task. The

influence of the aural stimuli seems to overrule the participants’ encoded

phonological system, as it allows the children to imitate the contrast. Alternatively,

the aural stimuli might activate an already encoded contrast. This would entail that

the children did not imitate the stimuli but relied on their own phonological

representations once the stimuli made them aware of this distinction. However, we

have found no proof for this explanation. On the contrary, if the contrast had been

activated in the children’s phonology, one would expect that it would remain

activated in the following task. Yet, the data for the picture-‐naming task suggest a

merger, rather than a contrast.

These findings are consistent with the predictions of the PAM-‐L2 (Best & Tyler,

2007). We have, for instance, found that because of the lack of a Dutch /ɛ/ -‐ /æ/

contrast, the learners tend to assimilate both vowels to one L1 category, namely, /ɛ/.

The fact that the participants tended to distinguish /æ/ and /ɛ/ in the repetition

task may indicate that they considered English /æ/ as a bad exemplar of /ɛ/, though

evidence of a perception task is needed here. In the long term, the learners might

also be able to encode this difference, as they were also able to imitate the contrast.

46

Finally, PAM-‐L2 also accounts for the fact that learners may consciously or

unconsciously gather information regarding the articulatory gestures at the basis of

sounds, in this case, the openness of the vowel.

Overall, the data from the reading and picture-‐naming task are thus more similar

than that of the repetition task in that they both reveal a merger of the vowels /ɛ/

and /æ/, as well as a more open pronunciation of /ɪ/. This is not to say that there

were no differences in the data of these tasks, but these were not as pronounced as

the differences between these two tasks and the repetition task. One such difference

is that the vowel realizations from the picture-‐naming task were longer than those

from the reading task. The different results in the repetition task can be explained by

the influence of the aural stimuli on the participants’ productions.

6.2 Native speakers’ perception of /ɪ, ɛ, æ/

The native speaker evaluations corroborated the findings from the acoustic

analyses. Since the results of the reading and picture-‐naming tasks are comparable,

we shall discuss these together and mention any differences where necessary. The

data of these two tasks revealed that the vowel /ɪ/ tended to be perceived as /ɪ/ or

/ɛ/ and that /ɛ/ and /æ/ were often perceived as /æ/.

The acoustic analyses already indicated that the pronunciation of the /ɪ/ was

acoustically close to that of /ɛ/ in the reading and picture-‐naming tasks, so it is

unsurprising that in some cases it is also perceived as such. However, in the majority

of the cases the /ɪ/ was perceived as /ɪ/. Moreover, when it is perceived as /ɛ/, the

vowel received higher accentedness ratings.

The data from the repetition task revealed that the /ɪ/ was more similar to the RP

pronunciation in this task. This is reflected in the categorization of this vowel, as it

was more comprehensible than in the reading and picture-‐naming tasks (see Figure

7).

The picture-‐naming and reading tasks also revealed that the acoustically similar

vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/ were also both perceived as /æ/ in the majority of the cases.

The native speaker evaluations also reflected an equal amount of variation in the

pronunciation. In both tasks, the vowel evaluations clustered around a number of

vowels in a similar way: the target vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/ were often perceived as /æ/,

/ɛ/ or /ɑ/.

47

The analysis of the realizations of /ɛ/ and /æ/ in the repetition task indicated that

the vowel /æ/ was realized differently from the other tasks. The lower

comprehensibility of the /æ/ in the repetition task (see Figure 7) reveals that this

pronunciation is not more target-‐like. In fact, the evaluations indicated that the /æ/

was perceived as /ɑ/, rather than /æ/.

There are also some differences in the data of the reading and picture-‐naming tasks.

We have already mentioned that the vowels elicited in the picture-‐naming task were

longer than those from the reading task. In the case of the /ɛ/, this resulted in a

higher accentedness rating. Furthermore, the accentedness ratings and

comprehensibility of the vowels differed slightly. These differences, however, are

not one-‐sided. If the vowels /æ/ and /ɛ/ elicited in the picture-‐naming task are

more accented, then the opposite is true for the /ɪ/. Similarly, the /æ/ from the

picture-‐naming task was more comprehensible than that from the reading task, but

its /ɪ/ was less comprehensible, as can be seen in Figure 7.

Figure 7 Comprehensibility of the vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ in the reading, repetition and picture-‐

naming tasks

At this point, we would also like to mention that the design of the categorization task

had some important implications in those cases where the vowel was

incomprehensible. In these cases, the vowel’s accentedness was judged on the basis

of the perceived vowel, not the target vowel. Thus, if a native speaker perceives a

target /ɛ/ as /æ/, the accentedness rating will pertain to the /æ/. This has for

instance revealed that in certain cases target /ɛ/ and /æ/ were both perceived as

similarly accented instances of /æ/. Alternatively, the task might have been

designed so that the accentedness rating would be made on the basis of the target

vowel, by displaying the target vowel after a vowel is selected. Thus, if a native

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

/æ/ /ɛ/ /ɪ/

Reading task

Repetition task

Picture-‐naming task

48

speaker perceives a target /ɛ/ as /æ/, the accentedness rating would still bear on

the target vowel /ɛ/.

A closer consideration of the East-‐Flemish situation reveals a number of

complexities. According to the data, East-‐Flemish learners of English pronounce

English /ɛ/ and /æ/ as [æ]. In Dutch, this presents no immediate problems, since the

East-‐Flemish [æ] or the more standard pronunciation [ɛ] are both instances of the

same phoneme /ɛ/.

If the speaker relies on this [æ] in order to realize an English /æ/, the learner will be

understood correctly, but the situation is ambivalent. If the learner knows that

English has a vowel /æ/ and is also aware that his/her /ɛ/ is realized as [æ], then

there are no immediate problems. If the learner ignores this fact, s/he will have still

have a target /ɛ/ in his/her mind, since [æ] and [ɛ] remain allophones of (Dutch)

/ɛ/. The accurate pronunciation is in this case unintentional.

In the case of English /ɛ/, the situation becomes more complex. A speaker ignorant

of the fact that his/her phoneme /ɛ/ is perceived as /æ/ and realized as [æ] will rely

on this vowel to realize English /ɛ/. In this case the vowel will be incomprehensible,

but the speaker might remain unaware of this. Instead, the learner might believe

s/he correctly identified the English phoneme /ɛ/ as equivalent to his/her Dutch

phoneme /ɛ/.

If the speaker is aware that English has a contrast between these vowels and that

his/her pronunciation resembles [æ], s/he may attempt to correct this

pronunciation by relying on the more standard Dutch pronunciation of /ɛ/. In this

case, the speaker would have more or less accurately contrasted English /ɛ/ and

/æ/ by relying on, respectively, the regional and standard pronunciations of Dutch

/ɛ/. Alternatively, the speaker may try to correct his/her regional /ɛ/ without

reference to Standard Dutch /ɛ/.

However, it is more likely that a speaker aware of the English contrast, is not aware

of his/her own realization of /ɛ/ as [æ]. In this case, the learner may attempt to

make the contrast by changing his/her realization of the English /æ/, instead of that

of the English /ɛ/, because s/he may think that his/her realization of /ɛ/, i.e. [æ], is

accurate.

It should be noted that the actual situation is not as clear-‐cut as presented here. In

some cases, the learners were able to accurately contrast the vowels. In the

49

repetition task, the participants sometimes merged the vowels as /æ/, instead of

producing an /æ/ -‐ /ɑ/ contrast. This suggests that there is still a significant amount

of variation in the participants’ pronunciations and that in some cases they might

perceive the contrast, while in other cases they do not. Furthermore, the

accentedness ratings showed that none of the vowels were pronounced with native-‐

like accuracy and that the learners’ [æ] is thus not perceived as a native /æ/. This is

not surprising, since the learners were not necessarily trying to produce an /æ/.

However, we take the comprehensibility ratings as the most important guide to the

learners’ pronunciation5.

What remains to be studied is the development of the English phonological system

of these learners. Returning to the above explanations, three important situations

should be considered. In a first situation, the learner would not be aware of his/her

regional pronunciation, nor of the English contrast. We hypothesize that, in this case,

the learner would continue to realize both English vowels as /æ/. In a second

situation, the learner would be able to perceive the contrast and be aware of his/her

pronunciation. In this case, the learner might be able to adjust his/her pronunciation

of /ɛ/ and possibly acquire the contrast accurately. In the third case, the learner

might perceive the difference but not be aware of his/her own regional

pronunciation. The learner might in a first instance rely on a /æ/ -‐ /ɑ/ contrast, as

was the case in our data. The learner may then encode this contrast or, if s/he senses

the contrast is inaccurate, reject the contrast. It is possible that the learner would

then rely on his/her regional variant of /ɛ/ for both sounds, unsure of how to make

the contrast. Although these cases are hypothetical, the participants to this study

would most likely fit in the first or third situation. If a learner of English thus wishes

to accurately learn the contrast, phonological instruction should not only point out

the existence of an English phoneme /æ/, but should also indicate that the English

phoneme /ɛ/ is not necessarily the same as the learner’s realization of this phoneme

in Dutch.

5 For this reason, we have also chosen to notate the learners’ pronunciation as [æ] rather than [ɛ̝].

50

6.3 Data gathering methods for research in SLA

From the discussion in Sections 6.1 and 6.2, it transpires that the data elicitation

methods influenced the productions of the children. Nonetheless, the data from the

reading and picture-‐naming tasks were more similar than those from the repetition

task.

The data from the reading task seemed the least affected by the data elicitation

method. We hypothesized that the grapheme <a> would, in some cases, be

interpreted as the vowel /ɑ/. The acoustic analysis revealed that, although the

productions of the target vowel /æ/ were less consistent in the reading task than in

the repetition and picture-‐naming tasks, the /æ/ was only perceived as /ɑ/ in 12.5%

of the cases in the reading task.

The productions elicited in the picture-‐naming task, then, were longer than those

from the repetition and reading tasks, though this only had a significant influence on

the accentedness of the /ɪ/. Nonetheless, we have verified that the vowels from the

context-‐dependent words were transferred to the context-‐neutral words. This

revealed that the task was not too cognitively challenging for the children.

While the reading and picture-‐naming tasks yielded similar results and were

practically feasible for the target group, the reading task may still prove the most

practical method, since it requires no training period and is less demanding for the

participants. Still, the focus of the study may also be relevant. Since not all

phonological distinctions can be made in writing, a reading task may prove

impractical in some cases. The distinction between /but/ and /bʊt/, for instance,

might be difficult to elicit in a reading task. Of course, one might rely on different

words, such as <boot> and <book>, to elicit the two vowels, but then the neutral

consonantal context would be lost. If one wishes to obtain this neutral context, the

picture-‐naming task may prove more practical.

With regard to the repetition task, the influence of the task design on the data was

more noticeable. Most importantly, the data reflected the participants’ ability to

imitate non-‐native vowels rather than their phonological system, since they

contrasted the vowels /ɛ/ and/æ/ by pronouncing the latter more open. The

influence of the aural stimuli might also explain the more comprehensible

realizations of the vowel /ɪ/. This influence, however, was not limited to the vowel.

A number of participants, for instance, realized the final /t/ as a fricative. One

51

participant interpreted the period of voicelessness after the vowel of the stimuli as a

phonemic consonant /χ/. While the native speakers were told to focus on the vowel

in their ratings, it is possible that their accentedness ratings reflected some of these

factors. It should also be noted that, even if these influences may obscure the

participants’ phonological system, the influences might nevertheless be revealing.

Even if the vowel contrast found in the repetition task data was not encoded in the

participants’ phonological systems, the contrast at least indicates that the

participants were able to perceptually distinguish between the sounds. It is possible

that this perceptual difference may later be encoded as a phonological difference.

At the very least, we would like to suggest that, in the context of this paper, the

reading task and the picture-‐naming task can be advanced as valid alternatives,

since there were no significant differences between the tasks that surfaced in the

data. On the basis of the data from the repetition task, this task has some

disadvantages when studying the phonological system of learners, although it is

practical for studies focusing on the ability of learners to imitate non-‐native

contrasts.

7. Conclusion

In this paper, we compared three data gathering methodologies in order to describe

the acquisition of the English vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ by Flemish children who had not yet

received formal instruction of English. Thus, we aimed to address two issues in the

Second Language Acquisition literature. First, the literature has primarily focused on

adults, while it has also been shown that the earlier a language learned, the more

successfully it will be acquired. Secondly, since this age group is under-‐investigated,

there is a lack of knowledge on research methodologies influence data and this study

provides a methodological basis for studies on phonological acquisition.

On the basis of the PAM-‐L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007), we hypothesized that the

participants would assimilate the two English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/ to the Dutch

vowel /ɛ/, because Dutch lacks a vowel /æ/ (H1a), but that they would be able to

assimilate the vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ to two different categories (H1b). We have found

evidence for a merger of /ɛ/ and /æ/, as was predicted by H1a, but the situation

proved more complicated than that described by Flege (1992) for Northern Dutch.

In the case of East-‐Flemish Dutch, both vowels tend to be perceived as /æ/ by native

speakers of English. Moreover, the acoustic analysis indicated that the vowel /ɛ/

52

was more open than in RP and Standard Dutch. Possibly, this more open

pronunciation is caused by a transfer from the participants’ East-‐Flemish accent,

although this should be verified by a study of children’s productions of Dutch

vowels. Because it was perceived as /æ/, the target vowel /ɛ/ was less

comprehensible than the vowel /æ/. Our data also suggested that, when imitating

the English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/, these tended to be produced as /æ/ and /ɑ/,

respectively. While the vowel /ɪ/ was also pronounced more open than in RP, this

was the most comprehensible and least accented vowel. If the children’s Dutch

pronunciation of the vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ are also more open than the Standard Dutch

pronunciation, the English vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ were assimilated to their Dutch

counterparts, as was predicted by H1b. However, because of their regional

pronunciation, the vowels were less comprehensible than expected.

We have also found that, throughout all the tasks and for all the vowels, the

pronunciation of the participants displayed a significant amount of variation.

Moreover, the vowel productions were all perceived as at least moderately or even

strongly accented. There thus appears to be a significant difference between the

vowels of both languages (or both varieties), even in cases where the L2 vowel can

be mapped on the L1 vowel, as with the /ɪ/. In order to verify some of the claims

made in this study, future research should examine children’s perception of English

vowels.

With regard to the data gathering methods, we have found an important influence of

the method on the data. We found evidence for the influence of the grapheme <a> in

the reading task, as was predicted by H2a. The target vowel /æ/ was produced with

more variation in the reading task than in the other tasks and was also perceived as

/ɑ/ in some cases. For the repetition task, the participants’ productions were

influenced by the aural stimuli they repeated, as was predicted by H2b. Specifically,

the children tended to produce a contrast between /ɛ/ and /æ/ that was not

observed in the other tasks. With regard to the picture-‐naming task, we

hypothesized that the cognitive load of the task would influence the vowel

productions (H2c) and found that the vowels were longer than in the other tasks.

Nonetheless, the data from the reading task and picture-‐naming task were similar

and a picture-‐naming task is thus still a viable method in the absence of a learning

phase. Using similar-‐sounding words, the participants were able to transfer the

vowels from real words to the target words.

53

On a final note, this study covered only a small portion of the Dutch and English

phonology and it would be interesting to see what the effect of regional variation in

Dutch is on the acquisition of the whole English phonological system. Since the

native speakers of English in this study were not from a homogeneous geographical

background, future research could also examine the effect of geographical

background on vowel perception. This might also lead to a more thorough

investigation into the acoustic weight of formant values and vowel duration.

In sum, we hope that the methodological comparison will provide a basis for more

consistent research methods in future research. We have revealed that, although the

predictions of the PAM-‐L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007) were correct, special attention

should be devoted to regional variation in order to correctly predict the acquisition

of sounds.

54

8. Appendix

8.1 Appendix A: English context-‐dependent words

/ɪ/ Pig

Kiss

/ɛ/ Red

Bread

/æ/ Hat

Cat

8.2 Appendix B: Dutch context-‐dependent words

Zwart Bal

Paard Bril

Boom Noot

Groen Boek

Zon Ster

55

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Bastien!De!Clercq! The!productionof!nonnative!vowels...

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