| 1. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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What affects recognition most – wrong word stress or wrong word accent?
- 2015
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Ingår i: Proceedings of Fonetik 2015, Working papers in General Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund. - 0280-526X. ; 55, s. 7-10, s. 7-10
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In an attempt to find out which of the two Swedish prosodic contrasts of 1) word stress pattern and 2) tonal word accent category has the greatest communicative weight, a lexical decision experiment was conducted: in one part word stress pattern was changed from trochaic to iambic, and in the other part trochaic accent II words were changed to accent I. Native Swedish listeners were asked to decide whether the distorted words were real words or ‘non-words’. A clear tendency is that listeners preferred to give more ‘non-word’ responses when the stress pattern was shifted, compared to when word accent category was shifted. This could have implications for priority of phonological features when teaching Swedish as a second language.
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| 2. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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Identification of stress, quantity and tonal word accent in Swedish
- 2016
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Ingår i: New Sounds 2016. International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech 10-12 June 2016. Aarhus, DK.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. The word stress contrast, as in ˈarmen ‘the arm’ - arˈmen ‘the army’, is mainly signaled by syllable duration, while the quantity contrast is realized mainly by duration of vowel and the following consonant, as in vila ‘rest’ and villa ‘villa’, (see Thorén, 2008). Whereas, the tonal word accent, as in ´anden ‘the duck’ - `anden ‘the spirit’ is signaled with different tonal patterns. When making curriculums for second language learners, it is helpful to know which phonetic or phonological features are more or less crucial for the intelligibility of speech. Regarding this pedagogical point, Abelin & Thorén, (2015a & b) examined the relative importance of correct realization of word stress compared to correct tonal word accent. They found that misplaced word stress caused many more non-identifications and larger loss than mispronounced tonal word accent. The present study seeks to extend the findings of the previous studies, by adding the perceptual weight of the quantity contrast. It thus aims to create a ranking list for the perceptual weights of all three Swedish prosodic phonemic contrasts. A lexical decision experiment was performed, where 20 native Swedish listeners were exposed to 50 intact words representing combinations of trochaic, iambic, accent 1, accent 2 as well as /VːC/ and /VCː/ categories. The test words were 10 originally trochaic words pronounced with iambic stress patterns, 10 original accent 1 words pronounced with accent 2 and 10 trochaic /VːC/ words pronounced as /VCː/. 60 nonsense words with the same combinations of phonologic categories served as distractors. The participants were instructed to judge as quickly as possible whether or not the words they heard were real words. The number of yes/no answers and non-responses (answers that exceeded the reaction time limit) were counted and reaction times were measured. The results show that participants tended to judge words as non-real to a higher degree when pronounced with distorted quantity than when pronounced with distorted word accent. The frequency of non-responses and non-word decisions for distorted word stress was slightly lower than for distorted quantity but still much higher than for distorted word accent. This seems to indicate that distorted quantity is more detrimental to word identification than distortions of both word stress and tonal word accent. We suggest that both word stress and quantity should be given high priority when teaching Swedish pronunciation. References: Abelin, Å. & Thorén, B. (2015a) What affects recognition most – wrong word stress or wrong word accent? Proceedings of Fonetik 2015, Working papers in General Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund, 7–10. Abelin, Å. & Thorén, B. (2015b) The relative perceptual weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts, presented at ISMBS 2016, Crete. Thorén, B. (2008). The priority of temporal aspects in L2-Swedish prosody: Studies in perception and production. PhD thesis, Stockholm University.
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| 3. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953-, et al.
(författare)
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The Perceptual Weight of Word Stress, Quantity and Tonal Word Accent in Swedish
- 2017
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Ingår i: Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage. - : Equinox Publishing. - 9781781795644 - 9781781796481 ; , s. 316-341
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When teaching the pronunciation of an additional language, the teacher should know which properties to give high priority and which to give lower priority. The present study aims at ranking the perceptual weight among the three phonemic prosodic contrasts of Swedish, namely word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. In two experiments, native Swedish subjects were presented with several disyllabic sequences; intact words, nonsense words and words that were distorted with respect to the three prosodic contrasts. The distorted words were not members of minimal pairs. In addition to intact words and non-word distractors, subjects heard originally trochaic words pronounced with iambic stress pattern and vice versa, originally /VːC/ words pronounced as /VCː/ and originally accent I words pronounced with accent II and vice versa. Listeners should decide whether the words were real words or not. The result shows that words with changed word accent category were rather easy to identify, words with changed stress pattern harder to identify, and changed quantity category caused most problems.
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| 4. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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The perceptual weight of word stress, quantity and tonal word accent in Swedish
- 2018
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Ingår i: Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage. - Sheffield : Equinox Publishing. - 9781781795644 ; , s. 316-341
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Wherever migration or travelling takes place, people need to learn new languages. This learning entails a variety of interlanguages. Irrespective of whether you are a learner or a teacher of a language, you need to decide how to allocate time and effort for learning and teaching into developing different sub-skills of the language. Four skills are considered in second language teaching and learning; listening, reading, speaking and writing. Proficiency in speaking requires sub-competences, such as pragmatic competence, fluency or making a clear pronunciation. Even having each of these sub-competences for speaking require having sub-skills. For example, to have a "good" pronunciation, one needs to well realise segmental features: phonemes, phonotactics, assimilations, and prosodic features: rhythm and intonation. Most of the time, young children learning their first language (L1) as well as additional languages (L2's) acquire these pronunciation skills without formal training and often reach a native-like speech also in additional languages. By contrast, adult learners of an additional language seldom reach nativelikeness in their pronunciation of the language. However, ideally, they still can achieve a fluent, intelligible and well-received pronunciation of the language. The present paper is concerned with the pronunciation of Swedish as an additional language, in particular, three phonemic prosodic contrasts, namely stress contrast, quantity contrast and tonal word accent contrast. We attempt to find out, among these three prosodic contrasts, which is more crucial than the others for making one's speech intelligible. That is, if the second language learner cannot acquire all of them perfectly, which of them should be given more priority in learning and teaching Swedish pronunciation? We also want to study whether or not a pronunciation lacking one or two of these contrasts can still be well understood.
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| 5. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953-, et al.
(författare)
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The relative perceptual weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts
- 2015
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015. - Chania 73100, Greece : Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech. - 9786188235106 ; , s. 1-7
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Abstract. In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyllabic words. When making curriculums for second language learners, teachers are helped by knowing which phonetic or phonological features are more or less crucial for the intelligibility of speech and there are some structural and anecdotal evidence that word stress should play a more important role for intelligibility of Swedish, than the tonal word accent. The Swedish word stress is about prominence contrasts between syllables, mainly signaled by syllable duration, while the tonal word accent is signaled mainly by pitch contour. The word stress contrast, as in armen [´arːmən] ‘the arm’ - armén [ar´meːn] ‘the army’, the first word trochaic and the second iambic, is present in all regional varieties of Swedish, and realized with roughly the same acoustic cues, while the tonal word accent, as in anden [´anːdən] ‘the duck’ - anden [`anːdən] ‘the spirit’ is absent in some dialects (as well as in singing), and also signaled with a variety of tonal patterns depending on region. The present study aims at comparing the respective perceptual weight of the two mentioned contrasts. Two lexical decision tests were carried out where in total 34 native Swedish listeners should decide whether a stimulus was a real word or a non-word. Real words of all mentioned categories were mixed with nonsense words and words that were mispronounced with opposite stress pattern or opposite tonal word accent category. The results show that distorted word stress caused more non-word judgments and more loss, than distorted word accent. Our conclusion is that intelligibility of Swedish is more sensitive to distorted word stress pattern than to distorted tonal word accent pattern. This is in compliance with the structural arguments presented above, and also with our own intuition.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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The relative weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts
- 2015
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Ingår i: E. Babatsouli & D. Ingram (eds.) Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, 7 - 10 September 2015, Chania, Greece. - 9786188235106 ; , s. 1-7
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
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| 8. |
- Febring, Linda, et al.
(författare)
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Pedagogisk design
- 2020
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 9. |
- Jeong, Hyeseung, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Do Malay and Swedish speakers of English understand each other well? Cross-linguistic comparison for using English as an international language (EIL) [i] Malaysia is a multilingual country where other languages beside Malay, the official language, are spoken. In our study we focus on Malaysian English users whose first language is Malay.
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In using English as an international language (EIL), one important issue is the mutual intelligibility of the pronunciations of EIL speakers from different language backgrounds. The present study examines the cross-linguistic intelligibility of Malay English and Swedish English. We prepared 15 English statements (evidently true or false if understood), and examined how well 30 Swedish and 38 Malay listeners understand the statements spoken by a speaker from the other language group by comparing the number of correct answers and processing time. We also analyzed the listeners’ own accounts of their struggles in understanding the speakers’ pronunciations. Results show that Swedish listeners struggled significantly more to understand the Malaysian speaker compared to Malaysians listening to the Swedish speaker. This seems to be because the Malaysian speaker did not clearly realize certain phonetic features, such as word stress pattern, consonant cluster and long vowel. Based on the findings, we discuss the core features of EIL pronunciation for intelligibility, and suggest further attestation and investigation on the concerned matter.
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| 10. |
- Jeong, Hyeseung, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Effect of altering three phonetic features on intelligibility of English as a lingua franca: a Malaysian speaker and Swedish listeners
- 2020
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Ingår i: Asian Englishes. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1348-8678 .- 2331-2548. ; :1, s. 2-19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Our previous study examined the mutual intelligibility of Malaysian English to Swedish listeners and Swedish English to Malaysian listeners. The results showed that Swedish listeners did not understand the Malaysian speaker well. In the present study, the Malaysian speaker was trained to alter her realization of the word stress, consonant clusters and long vowels in a way that previous research has found intelligible for both native and non-native English speakers. The audible and measurable alteration significantly increased the intelligibility of the speaker for Swedish listeners. This indicates that the three phonetic features are important for intelligibility in international contexts and suggests including the word stress in the Lingua Franca Phonetic Core. Moreover, we discuss that Malaysian English being a dialect and Swedish English being a similect may be relevant to their mutual intelligibility and relate the discussion to teaching English pronunciation in countries where English has been localized.
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