Does Final-Consonant Devoicing and Highly Confusable American English Vowels Affect the Production of English by Dutch-English Bilinguals
Open Access
- Author:
- Padt, Merel
- Area of Honors:
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Anne J Olmstead, Thesis Supervisor
Carol Anne Miller, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Phonology
Bilinguals
Phonetics
Psycholinguistics
Accent
Speech Production
Speech Perception - Abstract:
- When learning a second language, learners face several challenges: learning new syntactic structures and vocabulary and learning how to produce the phonology and phonetics of the language they are learning. Focusing on the production of English by native Dutch speakers, the production of English vowels by Dutch-English bilinguals and the transfer of the final- consonant devoicing present in Dutch (but not in English) to English were examined. The study specifically focused on their ability to distinguish the vowels /æ/ (as in cat) and /ɛ/ (as in red) and the consonants /t/ and /d/ in the word-final position. The vowel /æ/ is not present in the Dutch vowel inventory and is often produced as /ɛ/ by Dutch-English bilinguals. Dutch has final-consonant devoicing, meaning that regardless of a word’s spelling, the final consonant is always produced voiceless. In our study, we examined how Dutch-English bilinguals produce English vowels and whether they transfer the final-consonant devoicing when speaking English, and whether this causes misperception. Using a word-matching task, Dutch-English bilingual participant pairs interchangeably produced and perceived highly confusable English words (bad, bat, bed, bet, bid, bit). One participant said the word out loud, while the other chose the word they heard their partner say out of two potential answers. Acoustic analysis was conducted to measure the vowel, consonant closure, stop release durations, and formant values (F1 and F2) of the vowels. Out of all word pairs presented in the task, results showed the highest percentage of misperceptions in the bid – bit word pair due to final-consonant devoicing, as well as misperceptions of words containing the /æ/ – /ɛ/ contrast (e.g., bet – bat and bad – bed), indicating that these speech sounds were not always distinguished clearly in production. Analyses of consonant closure and stop release durations showed that words with /d/ as the final consonant were often produced more similarly to the duration of /t/, indicating that the Dutch-English bilinguals indeed devoiced the final consonant. On average, the vowel length of bad was significantly longer than the vowel duration in the other stimuli, and the difference between the vowel duration of bat and bet in the Dutch- English bilinguals’ production was closer in duration than native English productions of these words observed in previous research. Additionally, the formant values of the Dutch-English bilinguals’ productions of /æ/ had a great amount of spread and overlapped with the formant values of /ɛ/, indicating that these vowels were produced similarly spectrally. Although perception accuracy was generally high among all participants, the /æ/ – /ɛ/ contrast and /d/ – /t/ final-consonant contrast led to misperceptions of words containing these speech sounds. These findings show that Dutch-English bilinguals transfer features of their native Dutch phonetic inventory to English and provide support that this can lead to misperceptions of certain speech sounds.