Daniel Gugg, “Foreign Accent Sources in the Vowels of Highly Proficient Bilingual Korean-English Speakers”
Mentor: Hanyong Park, Linguistics
Foreign accent perception is an important area of study in the field of Linguistics. This project seeks to analyze several acoustic characteristics of vowels in order to determine if highly fluent bilingual Korean speakers of English carry any measurable difference in their vowels that might contribute to a noticeable accent. Speech samples were recorded from 5 monolingual English speakers and 5 highly proficient bilingual Korean-English speakers, and the samples were analyzed using the Praat speech analysis software. In the samples, formant values and movement, vowel duration, and fundamental frequencies were recorded for five different monophthongs and one diphthong, /æ/ /i/ /ɔ/ /u/ /ɑ/ and /eɪ/, and compared between the two groups. If there is a significant difference between the two groups, then further perception experiments can be done using the same samples in a perception experiment to test whether or not native English listeners can detect a foreign accent in words that differ only by the vowel. Because some of the Korean-English bilinguals in this study have spoken English since birth, it would raise important questions about what makes a native accent “native” if there are significant differences between production and perception of the vowels between the two groups.
Well-organized presentation!
Hello, I am Daniel Gugg, member of the Phonetics lab here at UWM. Thanks for taking the time to watch my presentation, and feel free to ask any questions or write any comments; I will do my best to respond in a timely manner.
A bit more info: I have been working with Dr. Park for about half a year, he has been a huge help with this project. Working with foreign language acquisition has been an interest of mine, especially with the case of bilinguals, so this project was in line with that. The plan is to follow up in the summer looking at consonants and intonation/pitch accents.
Well-done, Daniel!
This is a phenomenal presentation, Daniel. Very well done! Dr. Park wasn’t exaggerating when he told me that he was lucky to have found such a strong undergraduate research student this year.
I appreciated your use of audio clips throughout the presentation. This made your presentation interactive and engaging. I also thought you provided a solid overview of the basics of formants and vowel movement. This makes your presentation much more approachable for a wider audience than phoneticians.
I have two questions for you:
1) Why did you select the vowels you studied? Was it to focus on anchor vowels as a starting point for further vowel comparison? For Korean-English bilinguals, it would be interesting to compare all five front vowels in future research, as this may result in different findings than using the five anchor vowels included in this study. If you proceeded with this as a future study, it would be helpful to show the contrast between front vowels in English and in Korean.
2) What differences would you expect to find between monolingual and bilingual consonant and vowel production? Is one type (consonant or vowel) more salient? Harder for speakers to adjust? In other words, what does prior research say regarding what stands out more as being accented speech: consonants, vowels, or both?
For the audio clips of speakers, I noticed the difference in /t/ and /s/ production immediately with the first time you played the clips but the vowel contrasts weren’t as prominent. The vowel contrasts were easier to detect at the end of your presentation. It would be fun to hear a comparison of isolated vowels and monosyllabic words with different codas (something like ‘he’, ‘heat’, and ‘heats’).
Again, excellent presentation. This was fun to listen to.
Thanks for watching and commenting! To answer your questions:
1. There were other vowels in the corpus, but I decided to start with these one so as to get an idea of possible tendencies. I didn’t know beforehand that front vowels would be more fronted in bilinguals’ speech, but I was hoping a trend like that might emerge. I figured with /i/ /æ/ /ɑ/ and /u/, that would give a good frame of the vowel space. As far as including /eɪ/, Dr. Park’s previous work shows that diphthongs exhibit the difference between monolinguals and bilinguals to a large degree. I agree that in future studies, it would be interesting to look at all front vowels. The vowel space between English and Korean is very different in that respect.
2. So prior research shows that, at least for L2 learners, both consonants and vowels carry a lot of information regarding accent. I don’t know if there has been any research done that specifically compares consonants vs vowels in terms of which carries more information of accentedness. That’s a good question.