The Relationship Between Native Speaker Judgments of Nonnative Pronunciation and Deviance in Segmentais, Prosody, and Syllable Structure

TLDR

This study examined how experienced SPEAK Test raters' judgments of nonnative pronunciation relate to actual deviations in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Sixty reading‑passage speech samples from 11 language groups were impressionistically rated for pronunciation and then analyzed for deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure, with correlations and multiple regression used to link deviance to ratings. The analysis revealed that while deviance in all three areas influenced ratings, prosody had the strongest effect, consistently predicting global ratings across language subgroups.

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between experienced SPEAK Test raters' judgments of nonnative pronunciation and actual deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Sixty reading passage speech samples from SPEAK Test tapes of speakers from 11 language groups were rated impressionistically on pronunciation and later analyzed for deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. The deviance found in each area of pronunciation was then correlated with the pronunciation ratings using Pearson correlations and multiple regression. An analysis of the 60 speakers showed that whereas deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure all showed a significant influence on the pronunciation ratings, the prosodic variable proved to have the strongest effect. When separate analyses were done on two language subgroups within the sample, prosody was always found to be significantly related to the global ratings, whereas this was not always true for the other variables investigated.