Kazuhito Yamato yamato@port.kobe-u.ac.jp Shinobu Mizuguchi mizuguti@kobe-u.ac.jp !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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#784

• 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