Using automated acoustic analysis to explore the link between planning and articulation in second language speech production

ABSTRACT

Speakers learning a second language show systematic differences from native speakers in the retrieval, planning, and articulation of speech. A key challenge in examining the interrelationship between these differences at various stages of production is the need for manual annotation of fine-grained properties of speech. We introduce a new method for automatically analysing voice onset time (VOT), a key phonetic feature indexing differences in sound systems cross-linguistically. In contrast to previous approaches, our method allows reliable measurement of prevoicing, a dimension of VOT variation used by many languages. Analysis of VOTs, word durations, and reaction times from German-speaking learners of Spanish (Baus et al., 2013) suggest that while there are links between the factors impacting planning and articulation, these two processes also exhibit some degree of independence. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech production and future research in bilingual language processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• automatic acoustic analysis
• voice onset time

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Albert Costa for making possible the visit by MG to Barcelona which spawned this work, and for creating an intellectual environment that inspired us to collaborate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We emphasise that our study deals specifically with speakers who are learning a new language in adulthood in an academic context, which is only a subset of the many contexts of bilingual experience. We also acknowledge and challenge the privileged positioning of speech from “native speakers”, and the concomitant marginalisation of speakers who deviate from that idealised norm (Aneja, 2016). The aim of our analysis of differences between speakers is intended to elucidate bilingual language processing and not to make value judgments about differences between speech from L1 vs. L2 speakers.

2 Similar results are found when RT is measured by the common acoustic landmark, burst onset. Note that all of these acoustic measures are necessarily limited in that they cannot capture pre-phonation articulatory movements (Holbrook et al., 2019).

3 Given the low number of tokens of prevoicing for L2 Spanish speakers, and the overall lower rate of agreement in the duration of prevoicing, this dataset does not provide sufficient power for analyses contrasting the amount of prevoicing across the two groups. This may be a promising area for future investigations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (grant number R21HD077140) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (grant number R21MH119677).