Alshangiti, Wafaa;
Evans, Bronwen;
Wibrow, Mark;
(2023)
Investigating the Effects of Speaker Variability on Arabic children’s Acquisition of English Vowels.
Arab World English Journal
, 14
(1)
pp. 3-27.
10.24093/awej/vol14no1.1.
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Abstract
This study investigated whether speaker variability in phonetic training benefits vowel learnability by Arabic learners of English. Perception training using High-Variability stimuli in laboratory studies has been shown to improve both the perception and production of Second Language sounds in adults and children and has become the dominant methodology for investigating issues in Second Language acquisition. Less consideration is given to production training, in which Second Language learners focus on the role of the articulators in producing second language sounds. This study aimed to assess the role of speaker variability by comparing the effect of using HighVariability and Low-Variability stimuli for production training in a classroom setting. Forty-six Arabic children aged 9-12 years were trained on 18 Standard Southern British English vowels in five training sessions over two weeks and were tested before and after training on their vowel production and category discrimination. The results indicate that Low-Variability stimuli may be more beneficial for children, however, High-Variability stimuli may alter some phonetic cues. Furthermore, the results suggest that production training may be used to improve the perception and production of Second Language sounds, but also to inform the design of Second Language pronunciation learning programmes and theories of Second Language acquisition.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Investigating the Effects of Speaker Variability on Arabic children’s Acquisition of English Vowels |
| Location: | USA |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.24093/awej/vol14no1.1 |
| Publisher version: | https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol14no1.1 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) License. The images or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ |
| Keywords: | Second language learning, children's language learning, articulatory training, phonetics of second language learning |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10167564 |
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