The priority of temporal aspects in L2-Swedish prosody : Studies in perception and production

Foreign accent can be everything from hardly detectable to rendering the second language speech unintelligible. It is assumed that certain aspects of a specific target language contribute more to making the foreign accented speech intelligible and listener friendly, than others. The present thesis examines a teaching strategy for Swedish pronunciation in second language education. The teaching strategy “Basic prosody” or BP, gives priority to temporal aspects of Swedish prosody, which means the temporal phonological contrasts word stress and quantity, as well as the durational realizations of these contrasts. BP does not prescribe any specific tonal realizations. This standpoint is based on the great regional variety in realization and distribution of Swedish word accents. The teaching strategy consists virtually of three directives: · Stress the proper word in the sentence. · Stress proper syllables in stressed words and make them longer. · Lengthen the proper segment – vowel or subsequent consonant – in the stressed syllable. These directives reflect the view that all phonological length is stress-induced, and that vowel length and consonant length are equally important as learning goals. BP is examined in the light of existing findings in the field of second language pronunciation and with respect to the phonetic correlates of Swedish stress and quantity. Five studies examine the relation between segment durations and the categorization made by native Swedish listeners. The results indicate that the postvocalic consonant duration contributes to quantity categorization as well as giving the proper duration to stressed syllables. Furthermore, native Swedish speakers are shown to apply the complementary /V: C/ - /VC:/ pattern also when speaking English and German, by lengthening postvocalic consonants. The correctness of the priority is not directly addressed but important aspects of BP are supported by earlier findings as well as the results from the present studies.

The relative perceptual weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts

Abstract. In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyllabic words. When making curriculums for second language learners, teachers are helped by knowing which phonetic or phonological features are more or less crucial for the intelligibility of speech and there are some structural and anecdotal evidence that word stress should play a more important role for intelligibility of Swedish, than the tonal word accent. The Swedish word stress is about prominence contrasts between syllables, mainly signaled by syllable duration, while the tonal word accent is signaled mainly by pitch contour. The word stress contrast, as in armen [´arːmən] ‘the arm’ - armén [ar´meːn] ‘the army’, the first word trochaic and the second iambic, is present in all regional varieties of Swedish, and realized with roughly the same acoustic cues, while the tonal word accent, as in anden [´anːdən] ‘the duck’ - anden [`anːdən] ‘the spirit’ is absent in some dialects (as well as in singing), and also signaled with a variety of tonal patterns depending on region. The present study aims at comparing the respective perceptual weight of the two mentioned contrasts. Two lexical decision tests were carried out where in total 34 native Swedish listeners should decide whether a stimulus was a real word or a non-word. Real words of all mentioned categories were mixed with nonsense words and words that were mispronounced with opposite stress pattern or opposite tonal word accent category. The results show that distorted word stress caused more non-word judgments and more loss, than distorted word accent. Our conclusion is that intelligibility of Swedish is more sensitive to distorted word stress pattern than to distorted tonal word accent pattern. This is in compliance with the structural arguments presented above, and also with our own intuition.

La perception du français oral par des apprenants suédois

Swedish learners of French often experience large difficulties in understanding spoken French. Words that the learners know very well when written or when pronounced separately are often hard to recognize in the speech flow. The aim of this study is to examine Swedish learners’ perception of French speech in order to identify the problems. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part provides an introduction to the perception of a second language. It also describes the phonological structures of Swedish and French and gives an overview of studies of the perception of spoken French. The second part of the thesis contains a presentation and an analysis of four perception experiments conducted with Swedish learners of French. The results show that the learners often confuse phonological contrasts that do not exist in Swedish. It is furthermore found that the phonological processes of schwa deletion, liaison, enchaînement and voicing assimilation contribute to the perception problems. However, although liaison may complicate word recognition the results indicate that the so-called potential liaison does so to an even greater extent. In a listening test using nonsense words, the learners seem actually to expect liaison when perceiving a word that can be linked to a following nonsense word. In fact, sequences like un navas and un avas are both perceived as un avas. Paradoxically, liaison thus seems to be most problematic when it does not occur. As to schwa deletion, the results show that word recognition is delayed when the schwa in the first syllable is deleted, as in la s’maine. In addition, the learners make a large number of errors due to schwa deletion. This phonological process sometimes completely prevents word recognition, especially when combined with a voicing assimilation. Schwa deletion thus seems to strongly complicate Swedish learners’ word recognition in spoken French.