The perception and production of nonnative English consonants in native Norwegian speakers

Abstract

This study looked at the perception and production of the English unvoiced and voiced alveolar stops, alveolar fricatives, postalveolar fricatives and affricates. The voiced sounds in each of these pairs are nonnative to Norwegian speakers, except for the alveolar stops which are both present in the Norwegian sound system. Both a perception test and a production task were performed. Two groups of native Norwegian speakers participated. Group 1 consisted of people who had not spent more than a maximum of 6 weeks in an English-speaking country, and group 2 consisted of people who had lived in an English-speaking country for a period of time (4-10 months). A control group, consisting of native speakers of English also conducted the same experiments. The perception task had an AXB design, where the listeners task was to identify which of the two words in a minimal pair word X was equal to; e.g. looking at the contrast /s/ and /z/ by using the minimal pair and and playing as word X. Different Englishnative speakers had produced the stimuli which consisted of 18 different minimal pairs, which contrasted in the target sounds. In the production task, the stimuli were presented both orthographically and by audio one by one, and participants were instructed to read the word out loud after hearing the stimulus. The recordings from the production task were then judged by two native speakers on a 5-point scale, where the sound in question was rated from 1-wrong sound to 5- native-like. The raters were blind to the hypothesis. The study hypothesized that the frequency of minimal pairs containing the contrasting sounds would influence the results of the L2 groups in both the perception experiment and the production experiment. It was also hypothesized that time spent in English-speaking country would have an effect in both experiments. Contrary to the expectations, no effect was found on the influence of time spent in English-speaking country in either the perception or production results. The results showed an effect of the frequency of minimal pairs containing the contrasting sounds in the perception experiment, but not the production experiment.