Predicting performance

In

how w ll success in the communicatio e

the speaker and the listener (contrastive analysis) or from the acoustic structure of the sounds in the L1 and in the L2. We know from the literature (see Chapter two) that contrastive analysis of the sound systems of L1 and L2 often fails to make the right predictions but at least we will try to determine how (un)successful the predictions are. Predicting vowel identification from acoustical analyses of the vowels in L1 and L2 is a more promising approach since it uses detailed and fine- grained acoustical information that the traditional, basically impressionistic, contrastive analysis has no access to.

2 _{The one-way ANOVA for the sentence-based SUS scores yielded an F-ratio of F(2, 105) =}

326.7 (p < .001), which is in fact poorer than the result reported in Table 10.3 for the word- based SUS scores. The post-hoc Scheffé test indicated that only the Chinese listeners differed from the Dutch and American listeners, who did not differ from each other.

CONCLUSIONS 171

10.5.1 Contrastive analysis

Chapter three we reviewed an admittedly dated view on foreign language learning tween source and target language have positive transfer, i.e. do not cause a learning problem (Flege’s identical sounds). The target

re defined as confusions found for non- nati -way repe .001). All differences etw In

that states that shared phones be

language may also have phonemes that do not occur in the source language; these would cause an initial learning problem for the foreign language learner but these problems will be overcome with sufficient exposure and practice (Flege’s ‘new sounds’). There is a third category of comprising sounds that are almost the same between source and target language but differ in small but noticeable phonetic feature. These so-called similar sounds will be the most persistent sources of error. The categorization of English vowels and consonants in terms of identical, new and similar sounds has been given in Chapter three in Table 3.6 for vowels and in Tables 3.7-8 for consonants (Dutch and Chinese learners, respectively). It is not entirely clear how this classification translates into predictions of specific confusion patterns for vowels and consonants. To reduce the complexity of the analytic problem, I will restrict the analysis to only the communication of vowels and consonants between one non-native learner group and native speakers, that is, we will only consider four combinations of speaker and listener nationalities, viz. Chinese-American (and vice versa) and Dutch-American (and vice versa). I will assume that identical sounds are never a problem but that the production or perception of any English sound in the new or similar category will in some way result in perceptual confusion between the target sound and its immediate competitors, i.e. will lead to lower percentage of correct identifications of the target sound.

To simplify matters further, I decided to operationalize production errors as perceptual confusions obtained when the speakers are non-native and the listeners are native. Conversely, perception errors a

ve listeners when they are exposed to native sounds. In the following tables I have listed percent correct identification of all the vowels and consonants of English separated into three categories, i.e. identical, new, and similar (as defined in Tables 3.6-8) for each of the four possible combinations of native and non-native listener and speaker nationalities. Of course, the classification of target sounds in terms of the three categories differs depending on the non-native language involved.

No similar consonants exist between Mandarin and English. This category therefore remains empty. As a result of these missing data no two-way repeated- measures ANOVA can be performed over all data. Instead we ran separate one

ated-measures ANOVAs on each column in Table 10.5.

The effect of type of learning problem for vowels spoken by Chinese learners of English is highly significant by a one-way ANOVA with problem type as a within- listener factor, F(2, 59.3, Huyhn-Feldt corrected) = 18.9 (p <

b een pairs are significant by paired t-tests, even though the difference between identical and similar sounds is significant only in one-tailed testing (assuming that identical sounds should be transmitted more successfully than either similar or new sounds). For Dutch-accented vowels the effect of learning problem is also highly significant, F(2, 70) = 52.8 (p < .001). Paired t-tests indicate that every difference between pairs of means is significant at p < .05.

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172

Table 10.5. Percent correctly perceived vowels and consonants produced by Chinese and Dutch learners of English and perceived by American listeners.

Speaker nationality

Chinese Dutch Type

Vowels Consonants Vowels Consonants

Identical 51 83 82 76

Similar 44 --- 55 90

New 28 60 46 56

The effect of learning problem for Chinese-accented consonants is significant by a paired t-test, t(35) = 15.2 (p < .001). For Dutch-accented consonants the overall effect of learning problem is significant, F(2, 70) = 114.6, with significant differences between each pair.

The overall picture that emerges from table 10.5 is that identical sounds are transmitted from speaker to listener more successfully than similar sounds. New sounds are least successfully transmitted.

This finding is in partial conflict with the predictions made by Flege’s Speech Learning Model. The model is supported by the results in so far as identical sounds are indeed transmitted most successfully. However, counter to the model’s pre- diction, it is not the case that new sounds are less problematic than similar sounds. The latter result does not necessarily mean that the SLM is wrong. Quite likely, our learners of English have not had enough exposure to native English in real-life communicative situations to discover that they need certain new sound categories.

Let us now briefly examine perception problems on the part of Chinese and Dutch learners, when confronted with American vowels and consonants. The results are presented in Table 10.6.

Table 10.6. Percent correctly perceived vowels and consonants produced by American speakers and perceived by Chinese and Dutch learners of English.

Listener nationality

Chinese Dutch

Type

Vowels Consonants Vowels Consonants

Identical 39 63 64 81

Similar 22 --- 38 88

New 20 50 60 71

Vowels spoken by American native speakers are correctly perceived by Chinese listeners in the order identical, similar and new with 39, 22 and 20% correct, respectively. The effect of learning type is significant by RM ANOVA, F(2, 70) = 14.6 (p .<001); however, similar and new sounds do not differ from each other by a paired t-test. For Dutch listeners the effect of learning type is also significant, F(2,

CONCLUSIONS 173 65.8 Huyhn-Feldt corrected) = 31.6 (p < .001); identical and new sounds do not differ from each other by a paired t-test.

New consonant sounds are more difficult to perceive than identical sounds. For consonants perceived by Chinese learners the ant by a paired t-

35) = 5.5 (p < .001). For Du ers the effect of lear ficulty is significant by a one-way R A, yhn

aired t-tests show that all pairs of so types differ from each other. Note, , that similar sounds are perceived m adequately either id

unds. SLM would pre that simil nd identic unds do n iffer erceptually from the point of view of the learner; both types of target sound are elieved to be equivalent to sounds in the source language.

is only partially successful in predicting learning prob

predicts positive transfer (no learning ob

pred

(Chinese, Dutch, American English) who are exposed English sounds, specifically monophthongal vowels, spoken with a Chinese, utch or American accent. Can we actually predict the results we obtained in n algorithm such as inear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)?

I ran three LDAs. In the first, the class as based on the inant functions derived from inese-accented vowe s; it was applied to all vowel tokens, the ted ene

re we expect the Ch e-accented ns to be classified better, since the data are the same a e test dat his would a modelin f the guage benefit for the nese speak stener gro When the ese- discriminant functions are d to Dutch and Am nted kens, we simulate the situation where a Chinese listener has to identify these

difference is signific test, t( tch listen ning dif

M ANOV F(2, 65.6 Hu -Feldt corrected) = 26.7 (p < .001). P und

however ore than entical or new so dict ar a al so ot d p

b

Again, we may conclude that identical sounds are transmitted more successfully from (American native) speaker to non-native listener than either similar or new sounds. These latter two do not differ systematically. We have to conclude, provisionally, that Flege’s SLM

lems. Especially the predicted difference between similar and new sounds could not be found in the results, so that SLM in the present case does not do any better than Lado’s older transfer model, which

pr lem) for identical sounds, and negative transfer for any target sounds that do not occur in the source language (negative transfer).

10.5.2 Predicting vowel perception from acoustic analyses

Now that we have seen that contrastive analysis is only moderately successful at icting problems in production and perception of contrasts in a foreign language, let us consider an alternative possibility of predicting perceptual confusions by listeners with a particular L1

to D

Chapter six for human perception of these vowels from the results of automatic classification (as done in Chapter five) of the same sounds by a

L

ification algorithm w discrim the Ch l token

including Dutch-accen and the G ral American tokens. He ines toke

training s th a. T be g o interlan

ased Chi applie er-li up. erican-acce Chinvowel b

to

vowel tokens. Here we predict poorer classification results. In the second application of the LDA, the training data were the Dutch-accented vowel tokens; the difference in percent correct vowel identification between the Dutch tokens and the Chinese or American tokens would be a quantitative approximation of the interlanguage benefit for the Dutch speaker-listener combination. In the third run the LDA was trained on the American vowel tokens. The native-language benefit for the American speaker-

CHAPTER TEN

174

listener combination should show up in superior classification of the American tokens.

The LDAs were run on the ten monophthongs of American English only (see Chapter five), i.e. excluding the vowels followed by /r/, and excluding diphthongs. The vowel in hawed was also omitted from the analysis, as it typically merges with

the vowel in hod. This selection then leaves the vowels in the words heed, hid, hayed, head, had, hud, hod, hoed, hood and who’d. For the sake of comparability the

vowel identification by human listeners, as reported in Chapter six, was recomputed such that the set of response vowels was identical to the set of stimulus vowels, i.e. the same set of ten. Within the restricted set this selection resulted in only minor discrepancies with the full vowel identification results reported in Chapter six.

Figure 10.2A-B presents percent correctly identified vowel tokens, in two panels. The left-hand panel A displays the classification by human listeners, broken down by listener nationality and within each cluster by nationality of the speaker. The right-hand panel B presents the percentages of correct classification of vowel tokens by LDA broken down first by the L1 of the speakers who supplied the training data (mimicking the effect of listener), and with the clusters broken down further by the native language of the speaker.

Figure 10.2. Correct identification (%) within a restricted set of ten vowels by human listeners broken down by L1 of listener and of speaker (panel A), and by Linear Discriminant Analysis broken down by L1 of training data and by nationality of speaker (panel B).

As said, the human vowel identification (panel A) shows virtually the same scores as for the full vowel data reported in Chapter six. This indicates that the performance of the speaker and listener groups is not unduly affected by the selection of the ten

Chinese Dutch American L1 of training data Chinese Dutch American

Listener nationality 0 20 40 60 80

Correct vowel ide

ntification (%)

100 _Speakers Chinese Dutch American

CONCLUSIONS 175 target vowels from the larger set of 19. The automatic classification by LDA (panel B), on the basis of acoustic properties of vowel tokens produced by ten male and ten

m

lute m

lish monophthongs.

ure 10.3. Correct classification by Linear Discriminant Analysis plotted against human

fe ale speakers (after z-normalisation within individual speakers of vowel duration and Bark-transformed first and second formant values; see Chapter five), yields higher percent correct scores. If we abstract from the absolute difference in scores, we may observe that the configuration of scores for American native and Dutch listeners and their respective simulation in the LDA are quite similar. The configuration for the Chinese listeners, however, is rather different. Not only is the mean percent correct classification much better in the LDA, also the interlanguage benefit is so large here that the automatic classification of Chinese-accented vowels from Chinese-accented training data attains the highest score, even in abso ter s. This finding indicates, once more, that there is a lot of information in the Chinese-accented English vowels which might be used profitably in the process of vowel identification. Clearly, Chinese listeners are better tuned in to this information, but even they do not exploit the acoustic cues to the maximum.

The configuration of scores in panels A and B of figure 10.2 are correlated at r = 0.698 (p = 0.036). Figure 10.3 is a scatterplot of the nine pairs of scores obtained in human and machine identification of the ten Eng

F

perception of the same vowel tokens. Nationality of listeners (and L1 of the speakers ig

supplying the training data for the LDA) is indicated in the legend. Nationality of the speaker group is coded in the grey shades of the markers (black: American speakers, dark grey: Dutch speakers, light grey: Chinese speakers).

0 20 40 60 80 100