|
|
Sonorant devoicing in plosive-sonorant clusters in Czech-accented and native British English
Přečková, Klára ; Šturm, Pavel (advisor) ; Lewis, Suzanne (referee)
The main aim of this BA thesis was to compare the realisation of sonorant devoicing in native English speakers and Czech-accented speakers of English. Our initial presumption was that Czech-accented speakers of English would show shorter devoicing duration in the analysed plosive-sonorant clusters, possibly due to the different phonological structure. We focused on the speech of average speakers to see whether there are differences in the voicing characteristics between the two languages. We analysed segments from a BBC news report and measured the following variables: local tempo, speaker's tempo, voice onset time (VOT) and, finally, devoicing duration. The post-hoc test of the descriptive analysis proved that stress, as one of the variables in our data, did not play an essential role for non-native speakers, unlike their native counterparts. The statistical analysis showed a difference in significance between the different plosive-sonorant clusters. More specifically, clusters with /r/ in non-native speakers reached the highest similarity with English speakers. Based on the results of descriptive and statistical analysis we have conducted, the devoicing duration of the target sonorants was found to be shorter in Czech-accented speakers than in native English speakers, although the Czech speakers...
|
guest ::
