Colloquium 2
Friday, October 24, 2014
8:30 am – 12:15 pm
Issues in the production & perception of phonological aspects of connected speech of L2
Spanish/French/ESL
Organized by:
D. Eric Holt
University of South Carolina
The presentations in this thematic colloquium address various issues regarding phonological
aspects of when words are pronounced not in isolation but in connected speech in L2 Spanish
and French, as well as ESL. Topics include acquiring (re)syllabification across word boundaries
in Spanish and French, the reduced realization of intervocalic stops in ESL, the role of
information structure and prosodic cues to interpret meaning, the use of a spoken corpus in
teaching, psycholinguistic methodologies in testing recognition of (non)coincidence of word and
syllable boundaries, the role of feedback, and the perception of foreign accentedness by learners.
What prevents non-native speaker linking in L2 French?
Nadine de Moras
University of Western Ontario
This study examines the NNS production of French liaisons andenchaînements compared to the
production of Francophones; more specifically, the study examines the factors which prevent
linking: the role of a L1, the phonetic components which prevent linking, and the role of three
types of lexical frequency.
Acquiring (Spanish) resyllabification across word-boundaries: Results from a picture task
Carolina González and Christine Weissglass
Florida State University
This study reports an acoustic analysis of durational and transitional properties in CV sequences
across word-boundaries in a picture task in 33 L2 Spanish learners. The effects of transfer and
pronunciation instruction are explored, and the results obtained are compared to those from a
reading task by the same participants.
Across-word linking in connected speech in L2 Spanish
D. Eric Holt.
University of South Carolina
Careful styles of speech usually favor accurate production, but for connected speech we might
expect increased fluency to lead to higher production of synalepha and final-consonant linking,
but this is not fully the case. This study investigates variables like segment quality, prosodic
boundaries, word class, mean length of utterance, and others.
Go with the flow: Perception and production of reductionist features of connected speech
in Spanish
Elena Paz-Vizcaya
Dublin Institute of Technology & Universidade da Coruña
This study incorporates authentic connected speech from a spoken corpus and the use of a slowdown algorithm to document productive and receptive intelligibility problems for L2 students of
Spanish. It explores alternative methodologies, since the effectiveness of the slow-down tool was
deemed inconclusive in previous studies.
Recognition of resyllabified words by L2 speakers of Spanish
Daniel Scarpace
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper looks at recognition of resyllabified words in continuous speech, focusing on English
learners of Spanish in both priming and eye-tracking experiments. Learners of Spanish must
learn both that syllable and word boundaries do not always coincide in Spanish, and the
language-specific behavior of word-final and initial /r/.
L2 learners’ perception of stress and foreign accent in a syllable-timed language
Elena Schoonmaker-Gates
Elon University
The present study investigates the perception of foreign accent by L1 English speakers learning
Spanish. The results suggest that learners develop an understanding of what constitutes nativelike timing in the L2 fairly early, confirming the utility of using perception as a tool for
examining the learners’ interlanguage.
Production of stops in connected, spontaneous second-language speech
Miquel Simonet, Natasha Warner, Benjamin Tucker, Daniel Brenner, Maureen Hoffman,
Alejandra Baltazar, Andrea Morales, Yamile Dí
az, and Anna González
University of Arizona
We examine intervocalic stops in the L2 English of Spanish speakers differing in experience. We
measure consonants from spontaneous conversation and from word-list reading, and from wordinternal and word-final positions. Learners use L1-specific reduction processes in their L2, but
they do so selectively—for some sound but not others.