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An acoustic-phonetic comparison of the clear speaking styles of late Finnish-English bilinguals

Granlund, S; Hazan, V; Baker, R; (2012) An acoustic-phonetic comparison of the clear speaking styles of late Finnish-English bilinguals. Journal of Phonetics , 40 (3) 509 - 520. 10.1016/j.wocn.2012.02.006. Green open access

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Abstract

Research on clear speech, an intelligibility-enhancing speaking style, has proposed that global clear speech modifications which make speech more perceptible in adverse conditions are language-independent, while the more fine-grained segmental clear speech modifications, which enhance the salience of phonological contrasts, are language-specific [Bradlow, A.R. & Bent, T., 2002. The clear speech effect for non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 112, 272–284]. This study assessed the claim by contrasting the clear speech strategies used by twelve Finnish-English late bilinguals in their two languages, using spontaneous speech and sentence reading tasks. Their global clear speech modifications were also compared to those of native English speakers. Global measures included mean energy between 1-3k Hz, f0 median and range, and speech rate, while segmental measures included VOT for initial stop consonants and vowel spectral and temporal characteristics for two vowel contrasts. The global clear speech strategies of late bilinguals approximated those of native English speakers. Findings generally support the hypothesis that global enhancements are language-independent while segmental enhancements are language-dependent: the late bilinguals enhanced some of the segmental detail differently in clear speech according to the language being spoken, but most of the global clear speech modifications were consistent across languages.

Type: Article
Title: An acoustic-phonetic comparison of the clear speaking styles of late Finnish-English bilinguals
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2012.02.006
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2012.02.006
Language: English
Additional information: © 2012. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Keywords: speech production, bilingual, speaking styles
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/1340169
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