Spectral Characteristics of Schwa in Czech Accented English

• Authors: Jan Volín , Lenka Weingartová , Radek Skarnitzl
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direct

Keywords

EN

foreign accent; prominence; schwa; spectral slope

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 31-39

Dates

published

2013-03-01

online

2013-05-04

Contributors

author

Jan Volín

• Metropolitan University Prague

author

Lenka Weingartová

• Institute of Phonetics in Prague

author

Radek Skarnitzl

• Institute of Phonetics in Prague

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10015-012-0008-6