Project Description
English learners often find consonant clusters to be a challenge if those clusters aren’t present in their native language. For example, Japanese learners of English may pronounce “cream” as “coo.ream.” Such accented pronunciations of consonant clusters are the focus of our research. We examine the detailed acoustic properties of accented utterances and investigate their relationship with listeners’ evaluation, such as comprehensibility and accentedness. This research project consists of two parts: (1) acoustic analysis of foreign-accented English utterances and (2) perceptual evaluation of the accented speech. In our acoustic study, we examine whether vowel related acoustic properties exist in the accented speech spoken by non-native speakers of English. For example, if a Japanese speaker pronounced “cream” as “cooream,” we would find acoustic properties indicating “oo” in the consonant cluster “cr.” In our perception study, we have native speakers of English evaluate the accetedness and comprehensibility of the utterances. For instance, after listening to an utterance, a listener will rate the degree of foreign accent from 1 (no accent) to 7 (very strong foreign accent). We predict that the more acoustic “evidence” present in the utterance the stronger foreign accent listeners would perceive.
Tasks and Responsibilites
Undergraduate Research Assistants be involved in all aspects of this project (e.g., performing acoustic analysis, collecting perception data, coding the data, etc.), though their primary responsibilities are doing acoustic analysis using the speech software Praat and recruiting/running participants for experiments. If you have training with phonetics, phonology, or data science, that's a plus. However, if you are a diligent, persistent, intellectually curious student, and you are willing to learn how to do experimental linguistic research, Dr. Park and more experienced lab members will provide needed training and guidance.