Transcription Practice

The USA and the UK comprise 70 percent of all the English-mother-tongue speakers in the world.

Be able to identify the words that contain the indicated vowel.
[i] audible, hitter, lisp, pity, foreign, Nancy, horrible, slowly, leave, heed, crease, Greek
[I] seen, pitch, sneaker, feast, knit, cheap, sing, fist, greed, sinner, evening, each, eat

[e] sense, aide, starved, sensational, amaze, enough, nation, revolver, nervous, foreign
[ε] locate, perceive, slapped, said, maid, adept, laughed, check, came, tread, gained

[æ] panda, cabin, delta, cobra, bandit, camel, alone, coma, acted, dragon
[α] Hopper, dole, hotter, father, tranquil, market, polar, bargain, magnify, organizer, vanity

[o] could, groan, brook, flowed, boiling, cook, told, boat, crook, poised, posed, boiling

[u] goodness, groom, foot, cooled, woman, root, broom, shook, school, coiled, couch, under
[ai] imply, ironic, point, arrive, halve, advice, save, thyself, fatherly, breath, decide, lake

Review of Contrastive Analysis

The languages we compared in class are NASE (North American Standard English) and Spanish.

1.  Does Spanish have more or fewer vowels than English?

It has fewer (5).

2.  Comment on the significance of the following word pairs, identifying the vowels that speakers will target for each word.  (Also be able to transcribe these words).

a.  grid -- greed

b.  full -- fool

c.  buddy -- body

d.  mess -- mass

3.  What are the phonemes that can occur in syllable-final position in English?  What are the rules about syllable-final consonants in Spanish? 

English allows all consonants other than /h/ to occur in word-final syllables.  In Spanish, /s/, /n/, /r/, and sometimes /d/ are allowed.

4.  What allophones of /l/ exist in English and how do these compare to /l/ in Spanish?

REVIEW Questions/ MAY 2008

Important Concepts (this list will be made longer soon)

1.  What are suprasegmentals?

2.  What is phonotactics?

3.  What is contrastive analysis?

4.  What is an archiphoneme?

5.  What is neutralization?

6.  What is intonation?

7.  What is interlanguage?

Other Questions to Consider (this list will be made longer soon.  some answers will also be posted.)

1.  How does stress help explain the difference between rhythm in English and Spanish?

2.  Which archiphoneme can be related to how some speakers pronounce the medial consonant in the words latter and ladder?

3.  Do all English vowels have allophones?  Explain and provide examples to support your answer.

4.  Provide 3 examples of 3-consonant clusters in NAE and examples of words in which they are phonologically realized. 

5.  What are 4 characteristics of strong vowels?

6.  What is the "wedge n" and when is it likely to occur?  Provide an example to support your answer.  

7.  What does it mean to say that a sound is ambisyllabic?  Provide an example of a word which includes a sound that might be described this way by a linguist. 

8.  How many weak vowels occur in English?  What are they?

9.  What are the 3 perceptual properties of stress that we discussed in class?

a.  relative loudness with which an individual syllable is produced

b.  the length or duration of an individual syllable

c.  the tone of the nuclear vowel compared to that of adjacent segments (here pitch is significant)

10.  Which of the above properties tends to be the most indicative of stress in NASE?

11.  What are some of the pragmatic functions of intonation in NASE?  (In other words, what is it used to express?)  

Linguists such that it is pitch.

12.  Does English have phonemic stress?  Provide an example to support your answer.

It is frequently used to express doubt, anger, surprise, and to clarify question formation.

13.  Is English stress-timed or syllable-timed?  How does its organization of rhythm compare to that of Spanish?  Which is described as galloping and which as staccato?

14.  How does Walt Wolfram respond to the assertion that children who are speakers of African American are verbally deprived?  What principals does he define?

INGL 3227

What is Phonotactics?

Applied English Phonology by Mehmet Yavas (2006:236), one of the resources that I have used as supplementary material for this course, defines phonotactics as “A set of constraints of the possible sequences of phonemes within a syllable or word.”

Structural Factors in Second Language Phonology
When learning pronunciation of words in North American English (hereafter NAE), non-native speakers of English are often influenced by the sound patterns of their native languages. Linguists have frequently used the terms “interference,” “transfer,” and “interlanguage” to describe the influence of native languages over the target patterns. Among non-linguists, we often hear words such as “contamination,” “barbarisms,” and “bad English.” This latter set of words is problematic for a number of reasons. One is that it implies that there is something to be questioned about the intelligence or intentions of the learner, but as we have shown in class that is certainly not the case. Another problem with these perjorative terms is they provide little understanding of what is happening phonetically and phonologically.

The “accent” which learners often have can be said to originate in a mismatch between the learner’s native language (L1) and the target language (L2). For our purposes we will imagine the L2 to be NAE.

Mismatches between Spanish and English can take many forms. One of the common situations is the lack of a targeted sound in the speaker’s L1. This means that the speaker probably cannot pull from his or her established database of phonemes.

Especially problematic for many learners of Spanish may be the phonemes: /v, Greek theta, d with tilted back stem and cross-bar, x, d-yogh ligature, t + esh. This is because many dialects of Spanish do not have these. What is likely to happen when speakers target these sounds? As explained by Yavas (180-181), many speakers (especially monolinguals) will target those sounds that are closest in their own L1 inventories. As we have seen in class this means that a Spanish speaker’s pronunciation of the lexical items “chair” and “share” may be the same. One of the interesting things about variation is Spanish is that the phonemic values of vowels tend to be rather consistent across varieties (e.g., regional varieties in Spain and varieties in Latin America), while there is substantial variation in consonants (see Yavas 180).

Why might this be a problem? It is a problem because the initial consonants in these words contrast in standard forms of NAE.

Yavas cites these other examples:

Which of them do you think might be common among Puerto Rican speakers of Spanish who are learning English as their L2?

/Greek theta/ becomes [t/s] (e.g., thin, tin become [tIn], or [sIn])
/d with tilted back stem and cross-bar/ becomes [d/z/] (e.g., they / day become [de])
/v/ becomes [b] (e.g., vowel, bowel becomes [baul])
/z/ becomes [s] (e.g., zeal, seal, become [sil])
/esh/ becomes [t + esh] (e.g., shop, chop become [t + esh script a p])

We must also remember that the detection of an “accent” is not always due to a complete lack of the target phoneme; instead it can be a result of phonetic differences between identically defined targets and native sounds. One such is example is the final /l/ in the word animal; pronounced as a dark l in NAE, native speakers of Spanish are likely to pronounce it with a clear l.

What additional phonenemes have we discovered are problematic for L1 Spanish learners of NAE? What examples of these challenges can you provide?