LEARNING SECOND LANGUAGE SUPRASEGMENTALS: Effect of L2 Experience on Prosody and Fluency Characteristics of L2 Speech

Abstract

This study examines effects of short, medium, and extended second language (L2) experience (3 months, 3 years, and 10 years of United States residence, respectively) on the production of five suprasegmentals (stress timing, peak alignment, speech rate, pause frequency, and pause duration) in six English declarative sentences by 30 adult Korean learners of English and 10 adult native English speakers. Acoustic analyses and listener judgments were used to determine how accurately the suprasegmentals were produced and to what extent they contributed to foreign accent. Results revealed that amount of experience influenced the production of one suprasegmental (stress timing), whereas adult learners' age at the time of first extensive exposure to the L2 (indexed as age of arrival in the United States) influenced the production of others (speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration). Moreover, it was found that suprasegmentals contributed to foreign accent at all levels of experience and that some suprasegmentals (pause duration, speech rate) were more likely to do so than others (stress timing, peak alignment). Overall, results revealed similarities between L2 segmental and suprasegmental learning.This research was partially supported by research grants from the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University. Many thanks are extended to Youngju Hong for her help in testing the Korean participants and to Molly Mack and James E. Flege for their advice throughout this research project. The authors gratefully acknowledge Randall Halter, Elizabeth Gatbonton, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Randall Halter for his invaluable statistical assistance.