Phonetic imitation of t-glottaling by Czech speakers of English
The paper focuses on the ability of Czech speakers to explicitly imitate native English realizations of the phoneme /t/ as [ʔ] (t-glottaling). In Czech, glottalization occurs as a boundary signal of wordinitial vocalic onsets. We hypothesize that this allows for a better imitative performance in the...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta
2022-06-01
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| Series: | Linguistica Pragensia |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://linguisticapragensia.ff.cuni.cz/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2022/10/Pavel_Sturm_-_Joanna_Przedlacka_-_Arkadiusz_Rojczyk_142-165.pdf |
| Summary: | The paper focuses on the ability of Czech speakers to explicitly imitate native English realizations of the phoneme /t/ as [ʔ] (t-glottaling). In Czech, glottalization occurs as a boundary signal of wordinitial vocalic onsets. We hypothesize that this allows for a better imitative performance in the intervocalic context as compared to non-prevocalic contexts. However, an alternative hypothesis based on language-external facts (frequency in the learners’ English input) predicts the opposite pattern. Our experiment involves 30 participants in a shadowing task. In addition to words with /t/, words with /k/ are examined to establish if speakers can generalize to a phonologically similar category to which they have not been exposed. Speakers adapted their pronunciation after exposure to t-glottaling to some degree. Our hypothesis was confirmed for the shadowing task, while the alternative language-external hypothesis was confirmed for the post-test task, suggesting a different pattern of performance in terms of imitation versus learning. |
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| ISSN: | 0862-8432 1805-9635 |