What is it about?
Intonation and rhythm of speech are essential for comprehensible pronunciation in a foreign language. This study uses computer manipulations of melody and rhythm to create a short training to improve Czech learners’ pronunciation in English. The results show that such training is beneficial: six weeks after the training, the learners were perceived as sounding more competent and their pitch range was much greater.
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Why is it important?
Targeted manipulations, which only address specific high-gain pronunciation features, have a huge potential for learners’ improvement of spoken performance. Instead of “complete voice cloning”, learners know exactly what to focus on. Since intonation and rhythm are crucial for comprehensibility, the results of this very short training are very encouraging – especially how the learners’ speech is judged by listeners.
Perspectives
For me this was a crucial paper whose content was finetuned during several conference presentations and discussions. The research behind it led me to believe that phrasal prosody - targeting intonation and rhythm at the level of entire thought groups - is the most natural way forward in teaching pronunciation. I hope it will help pronunciation teachers in a similar way!
Radek Skarnitzl
Univerzita Karlova
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Training of English prosody with acoustically modified voices, Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, December 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jslp.24041.ska.
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