THE INFLUENCE OF SYSTEMATIC EAR-TRAINING UPON THE PERCEPTION OF RP TONES IN SLOVENE STUDENTS OF ENGLISH

Smiljana Komar, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana

I. Introduction

This paper addresses one question in L2 speech research: can a systematic perception training of L2 tones improve their identification in connected speech.

On the basis of our teaching experience we can claim that Slovene students of English when they are first asked to distinguish between a falling and a rising intonation they fail to do so in L1 as well as in L2. The reason for this is that they don't know how to listen to intonation. Once they are systematically told which intonation clues to listen to, the identification of tones improves. But the question remains: how much can the perception of tones, in particular those that are alien to the L1 tonal system, improve?

II. The sentence intonation in the Slovene language

There are three main pitch movements (tones) used in the Slovene sentence intonation: a falling, a rising and a level pitch. The standard Slovene and a number of dialects distinguish between two word accents: acute and circumflex. The influence of the acute upon the sentence intonation is such that a simple fall is realised as a rise-fall. However, this rise-fall belongs to the word intonation and should not be confused with the rise-fall functioning as the nuclear tone in a word group. As a matter of fact, the rise-fall nuclear tone is very unusual and rare in the Slovene language.

There is no compound tone in the Slovene language, which would be equivalent to the RP fall-rise. Thus the native speakers of Slovene have to acquire it in the process of English pronunciation learning. There is, however, in Slovene quite a frequent pitch movement which acoustically resembles the RP fall-rise when it is realised within a nuclear syllable followed by a longer tail. Most often such fall+rise tunes are realised in such a way that the falling part is within a word conveying new and more important information, whereas the rising part is within the word that is either less important or conveys old information. It is often the case that the words carrying the two nuclear tones belong to the same phrase. When this is not the case, the rising tone merely announces that another word group is going to follow.

2. Method and informants

The purpose of the experiment was to find out the influence that the perception training of L2 tones has on their identification in connected speech. The subjects were students of English at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

The experiment was a dictation. There were two groups of participants. The first group were 34 first year students who have not acquired any knowledge of RP intonation yet. Their dictation consisted of one isolated word, one sentence and 25 two-turn dialogues, taken from O'Connor and Arnold Intonation of Colloquial English.

The second group were 23 second-year students who have been practising perception and production of intonation for one year. Their dictation consisted of the same 25 two-turn dialogues.

3. Results

The 25 two-turn dialogues from Intonation of Colloquial English consisted of 70 word groups. The occurrence of different nuclear tones in the word groups was the following: fall-rise (24), high fall (16), low rise (13), low fall (8), high rise (5), rise-fall (4), level (0).

3.1. First year students

The results that the first year students achieved in the dictation of the word Marjorie, pronounced each time with a different nuclear tone, and the sentence Marjorie says so, each time with a different nuclear tone on the same syllable (Marjorie), show a surprisingly good performance (Tables 1,2). The overall percentage of correct answers was 79% for Marjorie and 79.8% for Marjorie says so.

The students had no problems distinguishing among simple tones. They were less successful distinguishing between the two compound tones, i.e. the fall-rise and the rise-fall. The fall-rise in Marjorie was misperceived as the rise-fall by 17.6% and in Marjorie says so by 14.7%, whereas the rise-fall in Marjorie was misperceived as the fall-rise by 23.5% and in Marjorie says so by 17.6%.

Table 1 – 1^st year results of intonation dictation – Marjorie.

Table 2 - 1st year results of intonation dictation - Marjorie says so.

The results obtained in the dictation of two-turn dialogues (Table 3) show a 25% drop in the percentage of correct answers compared to the dictation of the isolated word and the single sentence. Again we can observe that in simple tones the students correctly perceived them in more than 50%, while the percentage with the compound tones is slightly above 40% with the fall-rise and only 33% with the rise-fall. They were most frequently misperceived as the other compound tone. It is also interesting to notice that the fall-rise was in 14.4% misperceived as the high rise, while the low rise was in the same percentage misperceived as the fall-rise.

Table 3 - 1st year results of intonation dictation - dialogues

The comparison of correct answers obtained in the three dictation tests (Table 4) show that the first year students were most successful in perceiving the high rise and the level tones. Then come the falling tones and finally the two compound ones, i.e. the fall-rise and the rise-fall.

Table 4 – Comparison of correct answers (1^st year students)

3.2. Second year students

The percentage of correct answers that the second year students obtained (Table 5) is 61.7% which is a little less than 10% better than with their first year colleagues. The order of tones ranked from best to worst perceived starts with the high fall (82.3%) which is followed by the low fall, the fall-rise, the low rise, the rise-fall and the high rise.

Table 5 - 2nd year results of intonation dictation - dialogues

In order to find out if a systematic ear-training during the whole second year improved the perception of tones, we have to compare the first and second year results for each individual tone (Tables 6 – 11).

Table 6 - comparison of the results for the high fall

Table 7- comparison of the results for the low fall

Table 8 – comparison of the results for the high rise

Table 9 – comaprison of the results for the low rise

Table 10 – comaprison of the results for the fall-rise

Table 11 – comparison of the results for the rise-fall

4. Conclusion

The comparison of the results that the first and second year students achieved in the dictation of the dialogues shows that one year of ear-training was useful for two reasons.

First, most of the students managed to distinguish between a falling and a rising intonation. In addition they also learned to distinguish between high and low pitch movements, thus perceiving the difference between high and low rising or falling tones.

Second, the best improvement was achieved in distinguishing the fall-rise from the rise-fall, which was the main problem in the first year. The fall-rise seems to be best perceived if it is realised within a monosyllabic word or if a very short tail follows. Otherwise it tends to be misperceived either as the high fall or the low fall.

We can conclude that ear-training of intonation can be productive only if it is done step-by-step, i.e. if the students are first informed about the structure of intonation and then start gradually identifying individual parts of the intonation structure in order to be able to identify the whole tune. In addition they should be aware of the importance of tonicity and tonality for the organisation of information, so that they can presuppose the word group division and the placement of the nuclear tone. Only so will they be able to grasp the communicative role of intonation.

Bibliography

James, A., and J. Leather, eds. 1997. Second Language Speech: Structure and Process. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Komar, S. 1996. The Function of Intonation in Discourse Analysis of Interviews in English and Slovene. PhD Thesis. Ljubljana:Filozofska fakulteta.

Llisterri, J. 1995. Relationships between Speech Production and Speech Perception in a Second Language. In Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Stockholm: vol.4, pp. 92 – 99.

O’Connor, J. D: and G. F. Arnold. 2^nd edn. 1973. Intonation of Colloquial English. London: Longman.