This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and di... more This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a variety of phonetic contexts by young adult speakers from Western Sydney. The 18 vowels are well separated by duration and mean and dynamic formant trajectory information. Vowel durations and formant trajectories were affected by the consonantal context in which they were produced, particularly those produced in the /hVd/ context. Finally, the results indicate that capturing aspects of vowel inherent spectral change may be useful in future cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic studies. Copyright 2016 Acoustical Society of America
This study presents a comparison of the acoustic properties of Australian English monophthongs pr... more This study presents a comparison of the acoustic properties of Australian English monophthongs produced by 60 monolingual females from Sydney's Northern Beaches reported in Cox's [1] corpus and by the four monolingual females from Sydney recorded within the AusTalk corpus [2]. Cross-corpus discriminant analyses are used to investigate the acoustic similarity between the two corpora to determine whether the values from these corpora would be appropriate for predicting L2 difficulty in future cross-linguistic studies using Western Sydney speakers. Preliminary findings suggest that there is little overall acoustic similarity across these two vowel corpora as classification scores from the discriminant analyses were consistently higher for the Cox corpus than AusTalk. In particular, greatest variation between the two corpora is observed in their productions of front vowels. Limitations for drawing conclusions based on the current data are provided and the need for an additional ...
Second language (L2) learners often struggle to distinguish sound contrasts that are not present ... more Second language (L2) learners often struggle to distinguish sound contrasts that are not present in their native language (L1). Models of non-native and L2 sound perception claim that perceptual similarity between L1 and L2 sound contrasts correctly predicts discrimina-tion by naïve listeners and L2 learners. The present study tested the explanatory power of vowel inventory size versus acoustic properties as predictors of discrimination accuracy when naïve Australian English (AusE) and Iberian Spanish (IS) listeners are presented with six Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowel contrasts. Our results show that IS listeners outperformed AusE listeners, confirming that cross-linguistic acoustic properties, rather than cross-linguistic vowel inventory sizes, successfully predict non-native discrimination difficulty. Furthermore, acoustic distance between BP vowels and closest L1 vowels successfully predicted differential levels of difficulty among the six BP contrasts, with BP /e-i/ and /o-u/ being the most difficult for both listener groups. We discuss the importance of our findings for the adequacy of models of L2 speech perception.
This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and di... more This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a variety of phonetic contexts by young adult speakers from Western Sydney. The 18 vowels are well separated by duration and mean and dynamic formant trajectory information. Vowel durations and formant trajectories were affected by the consonantal context in which they were produced, particularly those produced in the /hVd/ context. Finally, the results indicate that capturing aspects of vowel inherent spectral change may be useful in future cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic studies. Copyright 2016 Acoustical Society of America
This study presents a comparison of the acoustic properties of Australian English monophthongs pr... more This study presents a comparison of the acoustic properties of Australian English monophthongs produced by 60 monolingual females from Sydney's Northern Beaches reported in Cox's [1] corpus and by the four monolingual females from Sydney recorded within the AusTalk corpus [2]. Cross-corpus discriminant analyses are used to investigate the acoustic similarity between the two corpora to determine whether the values from these corpora would be appropriate for predicting L2 difficulty in future cross-linguistic studies using Western Sydney speakers. Preliminary findings suggest that there is little overall acoustic similarity across these two vowel corpora as classification scores from the discriminant analyses were consistently higher for the Cox corpus than AusTalk. In particular, greatest variation between the two corpora is observed in their productions of front vowels. Limitations for drawing conclusions based on the current data are provided and the need for an additional ...
Second language (L2) learners often struggle to distinguish sound contrasts that are not present ... more Second language (L2) learners often struggle to distinguish sound contrasts that are not present in their native language (L1). Models of non-native and L2 sound perception claim that perceptual similarity between L1 and L2 sound contrasts correctly predicts discrimina-tion by naïve listeners and L2 learners. The present study tested the explanatory power of vowel inventory size versus acoustic properties as predictors of discrimination accuracy when naïve Australian English (AusE) and Iberian Spanish (IS) listeners are presented with six Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowel contrasts. Our results show that IS listeners outperformed AusE listeners, confirming that cross-linguistic acoustic properties, rather than cross-linguistic vowel inventory sizes, successfully predict non-native discrimination difficulty. Furthermore, acoustic distance between BP vowels and closest L1 vowels successfully predicted differential levels of difficulty among the six BP contrasts, with BP /e-i/ and /o-u/ being the most difficult for both listener groups. We discuss the importance of our findings for the adequacy of models of L2 speech perception.
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Papers by Jaydene Elvin