How to Conduct Prosodic Training for Foreign Accent Management Alison Behrman, PhD, CCC-SLP Iona College, New Rochelle, New York Friday November 15, 2013 ASHA Convention, Chicago
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A foreign accent is a communication difference, not a disorder. Foreign accent is the nonpathological speech produced by second language learners that differs in partially systematic ways from the speech characteristic of native speakers of a given language. Munro (1998)
Foreign accent is dependent upon many factors. Age of L2 acquisition and exposure to L2 Piske, MacKay, & Flege, 2001 The semantic content of the utterance Behrman and Akhund, 2013 Language background/experience of listener Bent and Bradlow, 2003 Speaker s beliefs about his/her abilities Moyer, 2007
Assessment Consideration: Why accent management training? What is your client s concern? Accentedness (degree of nonnative accent)? Ease of understanding? Accuracy of being understood (Intelligibility)? L2 speakers can be relatively easy to understand and intelligible despite have a foreign accent. Behrman & Akhund, 2013; Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2008; Munro & Derwing, 1995
Foreign accent can be described by its segmental and prosodic features. Segmental ( articulation ) Vowels Consonants Prosody (suprasegmental)
Prosody encompasses many features. Prosody is the study of the stress, intonation, and rhythm of speech and how these features contribute to meaning. adapted from Coulthard, 1992 Three main acoustic correlates of prosody Intonation Timing (duration and pause) Loudness These correlates are used to create Syllabic stress Prominence
Prosody plays a critical role in language comprehension. Linguistic (pragmatic) intent of the speaker Irony, sarcasm, emphasis, contrast, focus Linguistic features of an utterance Mark syntactic, semantic or dialogue boundaries Emotional intent of speaker Phonetic features of an utterance
Some prosody targets occur at the level of the syllable. Contrastive Syllabic stress DEsert (Sahara) desert (Ice cream) Derivative Stress DeMOcracy vc DEMoCRATic
Other prosody targets occur at the level of the phrase. My ASHA presentation is this Friday. My ASHA presentation is this Friday. My ASHA presentation is this Friday. My ASHA presentation is this Friday?
Prosody is not simple! Intonation contour I hope it goes really well today
What s the evidence to support prosodic training? Research suggests prosody training is effective in accent management. Barb, 2005; Behrman, in review, Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, (1998)
Segmental and Prosodic Approaches to Accent Management (Behrman, in review) Single-subject, alternating treatments, multiple baseline design with replication and counterbalanced for order effect Four participants: L1 = Hindi, L2 = Indian English A= baseline probe, B= segmental training, C=prosody training 2 participants ABABCACA, 2 participants ACACBABA Conducted via Skype
Results: Accent modification works. Both articulation and prosody are important. Articulation Prosody Accentedness Ease of Understanding
Assessment: Prosody training must be customized to the individual client. Features of native language interact with general American English. Hindi: Highly inflected with rising pitch on all content words Spanish: Prominence on penultimate syllable Chinese: Intonation used for lexical distinction, loudness used for stress.
Overview of the structure of prosodic training sessions Short explanation of each prosody target Focused auditory stimulation Auditory discrimination training Production training
Rules approach may be too complicated. Patterns that characterize American English: Upward inflection signals a y/n question (only sometimes). Upward then downward signals open-ended question (only sometimes). Stress on syllables of descriptive words. Intonational Units approach chunking intonational idioms Wennerstrom (2001)
Production training of prosodic targets must be contextually appropriate. Assign an emotion/intent to the statement. Pretend you are surprised when you respond to what I say. Respond to my comment with emphasis. I hear it s pretty there. Yes, it s really beautiful there. Request clarification ASHA meets in October in NYC, right?
Contextually appropriate examples. Action picture description of emotional or controversial topic.
Here are more contextually appropriate examples. Complete the sentence ( I disagreed strongly with his strategy and I told him... ) Social- and work-based conversational practice Rehearsed Conversational/extemporaneous
Use lots of different cues to facilitate accuracy producing prosody targets. Visual cues Staircase Curves Dots & lines Bolded type Raised type My name is of. course I think so Alison why Probably Not not?
Use lots of different cues to facilitate accuracy of prosody targets. Auditory cues Modeling Melodic syllable patterns using percussive beat
Train compensatory strategies to increase ease of understanding and intelligibility. Pausing to manage speech rate Zhao (1997) Clear speech Smiljanic and Bradlow (2009)
Read aloud for prosody first and comprehension second. Text the SLP provides. Situationally relevant text written by the client.
Weekly listening assignments help the client focus upon prosody. Listening for rhythm.
In summary... Consider use of discourse approach to prosody training Consider the sociopsychological aspects of accent
References Behrman, A., & Akhund, A. (2013). The Influence of Semantic Context on the Perception of Spanish-Accented American English. Journal of Speech, Language, Hearing Research, 56. 1567-1578. Bent, T., & Bradlow, A.R. (2003). The inter language speech intelligibility benefit. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114, 1600-1610. Brazil, D. (1997). The communicative value of intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulthard, M. (1992). The significance of intonation in discourse. Advances in Spoken Discourse. Routledge: London. Kennedy, S., & Trofimovich, P. (2008). Intelligibility, Comprehensibility, and Accentedness of L2 Speech: The role of listener experience and semantic context. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 64, 459-489. Levis, J. (2001). Teaching focus for conversational use. English language teaching journal, 55(1), 47-54. Moyer, A. (2007). Do language attitudes determine accent? A stud of bilinguals in the U.S. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 28, 1-17. Munro, M. (1998). The effects of noise on the intelligibility of foreign-accented speech. Studies in Second Language Learning, 20, 139 154. Munro, M.J., & Derwing, T.M. (1995). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning, 45, 73-97. doi:10.1111/0023-8333.49.s1.8
References Piske, T., MacKay, I.R.A., & Flege, J.E. (2001). Factors affecting degree of foreign accent in an L2: a review. Journal of Phonetics, 29, 191-215. doi.10.1006/jpho.2001.0134 Smiljanic, R., & Bradlow, A. R. (2009). Speaking and hearing clearly: Talker and listener factors in speaking style changes. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 236-264. Wennerstrom, A. (2001). The music of everyday speech: Prosody and discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zhao, Y. (1997). The effects of listeners control of speech rate on second language comprehension. Applied Linguistics, 18, 49-68