perception of prosodic cues by japanese efl learners
DESCRIPTION
short paper presentation at JALT 2013 KobeTRANSCRIPT
Kazuhito Yamato [email protected] Shinobu Mizuguchi [email protected] !Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University
JALT2013 Kobe 28.10.2013 @ Kobe Convention Center Room #304
Perception of prosodic cues by Japanese EFL learners
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• This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24520542.
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• Project members
• Project leader: Shinobu Mizuguchi
• Project members: Gábor Pintér, Koichi Tateishi, Kazuhito Yamato
acknowledgment
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1. Intro
2.Previous studies
3.Research Question
4.Survey: Method/Procedure
5.Results & Discussion
6. Implications for teaching
Outline
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• Lack of / Need for teaching prosody to Japanese EFL learners(JEFLLs) (listening/speaking)
• Few studies dealing with JELLLs’ perceiving natural speed English
1.1 Background
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1. Intro
• to investigate how Japanese EFL learners perceive prosodic cues in spoken English using Rapid Prosody Transcription task.
• a replication study of Mo et al.(2008) (an
approximate replication cf. Porte, 2012)
1.2 Purpose
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1. Intro
• Mo et al. (2008): whether naïve listeners can detect boundary and prominence or not
• consistent in their perception of prosodic boundaries and prominence
2.1 Mo et al.(2008)
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2. Previous Studies
• impressionistic perceptual transcription of prosodic structure (Mo et al., 2008)
• a real-time listening task
•phrase boundary (chunk): to place slashes in the script
•prominence: to underline the script
2.1.1 Rapid Prosody Transcription
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2. Previous Studies
1.Intro
2.Previous Studies
3.Research Question 3.1. Issues from Previous Studies 3.2. Research Questions in this study
4.Survey
5.Results & Discussion
6.Implication for teaching
Outline
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• Listeners
•mainly by native speakers of English
•non-native speakers? Japanese EFL learners?
• RPT
• naïve listeners like language learners?
3.1 Issues from Previous Studies
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3. Research Question
• Do non-native speakers (i.e. Japanese learners of English) perceive prosody differently from native speakers of English? If so, how?
• Any difference according to learners’ proficiency levels?
• Any implication for teaching English?
3.2 Research Questions in this study
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3. Research Question
• Audio stimuli
•excerpts from Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al., 2007)
•spontaneous speech; monologue (interview)
•duration: around 10 seconds (cf. 20 sc in Cole et al. 2010)
• Printed materials
•audio transcript
•no punctuation, no capital letters
4.1 Materials
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4. Survey
• Rapid Prosody Transcription
•phrase boundary: mark “/“ between words that belong to different “chunks”
•prominence: underline a word that highlights for the listener and stands out from other words.
• audio played: twice for each transcription
4.2 Transcription procedure
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4. Survey
• 38 Japanese EFL learners (JEFLLs)
• TOEFL PBT score: avg. 483.5 (SD 25.86)
•H-JEFLLs (n=10; x>mean+0.5 SD)
•L-JEFLLs (n=11; x>mean-0.5 SD)
4.3 Participants
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4. Survey
• b-score: boundary mark / participants (ranges 0-1)
• p-score: prominence mark / participants (ranges 0-1)
• inter-listener agreement: Fleiss’ kappa
• comparison with Mo et al.(2008)
4.4 Analysis
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4. Survey
• cf. Mo et al.(2008)
• inter-listener agreement
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5. Results & Discussion5.1 Results
H-JEFLLs L-JEFLLsboundary (κ) .704 .670
prominence (κ) .260 .277
group 1 group 2 group 3 group 4boundary (κ) .612 .544 .621 .575
prominence (κ) .373 .421 .394 .407
• agreement • NS > JEFFLs • boundary > prominence
• high agreement in both groups
•H-JEFLLs: κ= .704
•L-JEFLLs: κ= .670
• pauses: the most important cue for boundary detection
• fillers, slow tempo: important cues
• syntactic cues: less important (cf. Cole et al., 2010)
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5. Results & Discussion5.1.1 Phrase Boundary
5.1 Results
• high correlation with silent pauses
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5. Results & Discussion5.1.1 Phrase Boundary5.1 Results
• syntactic cues: relevant in NS perception
• low agreement in both groups
•H-JEFLLs: = .260
•L-JEFLLs: = .277
• not so high in Mo et al. (2008), though high consistency in nuclear accent perception than in pre-nucleus accent
• L1 interference?
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5. Results & Discussion5.1.2 Prominence5.1 Results
• low agreement in both groups
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5. Results & Discussion5.1.2 Prominence5.1 Results
• not relying on prominence or not knowing about prominence?
• regardless of proficiency levels...
•high agreement on phrase boundary
•pauses, fillers and slow tempo > syntactic cues.
• low agreement on prominence
•→ JEFLLs rely on the more frequent minor-phrase boundaries (cf. Kawahara & Shinya, 2008)
5.2 Discussion
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5. Results & Discussion
• teaching listening
• relation bet syntactic structure and prosody
•prominence as prosodic cues (Celce-Murcia et al. 2010)
• teaching pronunciation
• relation bet syntactic structure and prosody
•prominence as prosodic cues
•practice one nucleus in a phrase boundary (Saito & Ueda, 2011; Nanjo, 2010)
teaching listening & pronunciation
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6. Implication for teaching
• RPT can be used to non-native speakers of English
• phrase boundary perception
•high inter-listener agreement among JEFLLs (H- and L-)
•pauses are the primary source of boundary perception
• prominence perception
• low inter-listener agreement among JEFLLs (H- and L-)
•NS > JEFLLs
• implications
•need more attention to prosodic cues / nucleus in a boundary
• further research
•on relationships with syntactic structure and on production
findings and remaining issues
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Summary
• Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (with Griner, B.). 2010. Teaching pronunciation: A course book and reference guide. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Cole, J., Mo, Y., & Baek, S. (2010). The role of syntactic structure in guiding prosody perception with ordinary listeners and everyday speech. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 1141-1177.
• Mo, Y., Cole, J. & Lee, E. (2008). Naïve listeners’ prominence and boundary perception. In P. A. Barbosa, S. Madureira, & C. Reis (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 735-736). Campinas, Brazil, May 69, 2008. Available from ISCA Archive: http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/sp2008.
• Mo, Y., & Cole, J. (2010). Perception of prosodic boundaries in spontaneous speech with and without silent pauses. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127, 1956.
• Kawahara, S., & Shinya, T. (2008). The intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese: Evidence for intonational phrase and utterance. Phonetica, 65, 62-105.
• Pitt, M.A., Dilley, L., Johnson, K., Kiesling, S., Raymond, W., Hume, E. and Fosler-Lussier, E. 2007. Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech (2nd release) [www.buckeyecorpus.osu.edu] Columbus, OH: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University (Distributor).
• Porte, G. (ed). (2012). Replication research in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
•斎藤弘子・上田功 (2011) 「英語学習者によるイントネーション核の誤配置」 『音声研究』 15, 87-95.
•南條健助 (2010) 「音声学・音韻論と発音指導」 大学英語教育学会(監) 岡田伸夫・南出康世・梅咲敦子(編) (2010) 『英語教育学大系 第8巻 英語研究と英語教育 -ことばの研究を教育に活かす』東京: 大修館書店 pp. 3-21.
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References