Quantifying Australian L2 Spanish pronunciation

Abstract

The research base of pronunciation teaching is enhanced by quantifying the differences between native and non-native pronunciation. The quantification allows teachers to target the specific differences that contribute to heavilyaccented Spanish. This case study compares the phonetic-acoustic features of a female Australian learner of Spanish with those of a native speaker of Spanish. Both speech samples are recordings of the same text, giving a like-with-like comparison. The speaker’s recording and a native-speaker recording will be compared for each word and environment. Voice onset time measures show less variation for the native speaker recording, while the non-native speaker shows variation more typical of English than Spanish. Vowel formant measures also show more variation in the speech of the non-native learner than of the native speaker, including neutralisation of unstressed vowels. In addition, several other non-native features occur in the learner’s pronunciation: obstruents where fricatives or approximants are expected; weak pronunciation of /r/ and voiceless vowels. Prosodic differences, notably in syllabification and vowel liaison but also intonation, were noted.