short paper presentation at JALT 2013 Kobe

1. JALT2013 Kobe 28.10.2013
@ Kobe Convention Center Room #304
#784
Perception of prosodic cues
by Japanese EFL learners
Kazuhito Yamato
yamato@port.kobe-u.ac.jp
Shinobu Mizuguchi
mizuguti@kobe-u.ac.jp
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Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University
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2. acknowledgment
•
This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number
24520542.
!
•
Project members
• Project leader: Shinobu Mizuguchi
• Project members: Gábor Pintér, Koichi Tateishi, Kazuhito
Yamato
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3. Outline
1. Intro
2. Previous studies
3. Research Question
4. Survey: Method/Procedure
5. Results & Discussion
6. Implications for teaching
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4. 1. Intro
1.1 Background
• Lack of / Need for teaching prosody to
Japanese EFL learners(JEFLLs) (listening/
speaking)
• Few studies dealing with JELLLs’ perceiving
natural speed English
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5. 1. Intro
1.2 Purpose
• 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)
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6. 2. Previous Studies
2.1 Mo et al.(2008)
• Mo et al. (2008): whether naïve listeners can
detect boundary and prominence or not
• consistent in their perception of prosodic
boundaries and prominence
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7. 2. Previous Studies
2.1.1 Rapid Prosody Transcription
• 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
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8. Outline
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
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9. 3. Research Question
3.1 Issues from Previous Studies
• Listeners
• mainly by native speakers of English
• non-native speakers? Japanese EFL
learners?
• RPT
• naïve listeners like language learners?
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10. 3. Research Question
3.2 Research Questions in this study
• 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?
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11. 4. Survey
4.1 Materials
• 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
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12. 4. Survey
4.2 Transcription procedure
• 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
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13. 4. Survey
4.3 Participants
• 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)
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14. 4. Survey
4.4 Analysis
• 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)
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15. 5. Results & Discussion
5.1 Results
• inter-listener agreement
H-JEFLLs
L-JEFLLs
boundary (κ)
.704
.670
prominence (κ)
.260
.277
• cf. Mo et al.(2008)
group 1 group 2 group 3
group 4
boundary (κ)
.612
.544
.621
.575
prominence (κ)
.373
.421
.394
.407
• agreement
• NS > JEFFLs
• boundary > prominence
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16. 5. Results & Discussion
5.1 Results
5.1.1 Phrase Boundary
• 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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17. 5. Results & Discussion
5.1 Results
5.1.1 Phrase Boundary
• high correlation with silent pauses
• syntactic cues: relevant in NS perception
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18. 5. Results & Discussion
5.1 Results
5.1.2 Prominence
• 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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19. 5. Results & Discussion
5.1 Results
5.1.2 Prominence
• low agreement in both groups
• not relying on prominence or not knowing about prominence?
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20. 5. Results & Discussion
5.2 Discussion
• 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 minorphrase boundaries (cf. Kawahara & Shinya,
2008)
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21. 6. Implication for teaching
teaching listening & pronunciation
• 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)
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22. Summary
findings and remaining issues
• 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
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23. References
• 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, 8795.
• 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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