January 16 2021, 20:35

I came across an interesting study on phonetics.

There is a recommendation for English pronunciation to lengthen the vowel before the last consonant if it happens to be voiced. For example, knees (kneees) or eyes (eyez), and not extend it as much when it’s voiceless, as in niece (neese) or ice (ice).

So, in the study an English-speaking announcer read out the non-existent word theep. It was slightly edited. They trimmed the [p] at the end to make it sound barely there, without a strong puff of air. And they cut [i] from one recording so that they got fragments of different lengths. As if the announcer read theep, theeep, theeeep, theeeeep, etc.

But at the same time, the final [p] was the same everywhere,

i.e., the announcer did not read it differently. They played the recording to Poles who were beginning to learn English. In Polish, as in Russian, voiced fricative consonants become voiceless at the end of a word.

90% of the novice Poles thought that it ended with the sound [p]. Regardless of the vowel length.

But when the same recordings were played to native speakers, in the case of a shorter [i] 100% of the natives said that it ended with [p], while in the recording with the longest [i] 90% of the native speakers heard [b].

Although there was definitely no voiced [b] there.

It turns out that we lack such a clever algorithm for analyzing vowel length, which also imagines things that aren’t actually there, while native speakers possess it. Russian speakers find it hard to learn to distinguish these subtle nuances of length.

Partly for this reason it is sometimes quite difficult to understand why it seems to us that we pronounce the word correctly – just like a native speaker, but for a native it’s two different words. Their ears are “tuned” to very subtle aspects of a specific sound, and anything slightly off — already sounds like an accent.

(I highly recommend googling PhoneticFanatic for those interested in the topic. The study can be searched by “Preceding Vowel Duration As A Cue To The Consonant Voicing Contrast: Perception Experiments With Polish-English Bilinguals” by Arkadiusz Rojczyk)

#English #pronunciation #notes