Prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries in foreigner talk.

摘要

A series of experiments was conducted in order to isolate the speech style known as "foreigner-talk" and to characterize it not only in terms of general prosodic features, but also to examine associations between prosody and syntactic structures occurring in this speech style. Perception tests were carried out to determine whether listeners recognize foreigner-talk as opposed to native-to-native speech, and acoustic measurements were taken of the various speech samples in the two speech styles for durations and intonation contours with respect to syntactic structure. Similar experiments were conducted for two different languages, English and Spanish, in order to determine whether adjustments made in speech to second-language learners were equivalent for a stress-timed versus a syllable-timed language. All of the studies utilized matched utterances in order to make comparisons over identical segmental components. It was found that discernible adjustments are evident in speech to foreigners, and that permutations in the suprasegmental domain are more evident to listeners of lower proficiency in the target language. Mechanical measurements demonstrated that foreigner-talk is not only slower overall than native-to-native talk, but that phrase-final segments and pauses are lengthened to foreigners, information is "chunked" more frequently in speech addressed to foreigners, and intonation contours show some exaggeration in the foreignese register, not only in measurements over the entire utterance. but also with respect to syntax. Measurements for English and Spanish speech samples demonstrated similarities in speech adjustments addressed to foreigners, particularly in durational aspects.