Читать книгу Second Language Pronunciation - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Ron I. Thomson

Brock University

When my son Elliot was a toddler, he would proudly let people know that his name was “Elliort” [ɛlijɝt]. This went on for many months until one day, for posterity, I recorded him in the following exchange:

DADDY: What’s your name?

SON: Elliort

DADDY: Elliort?

SON: No! Elliort!

DADDY: Okay, Elliort.

SON: (laughing) DAUGHTER: (interrupting) Elliot! SON: Elliot DAUGHTER: Elliot SON: Yeah, Elliot. (after several more such exchanges) DADDY: Elliot? SON: Yes. DADDY: Say it. SON: Elliort

Without the benefit of further modeling from his preschool sister, my perceptual gaslighting continued and he continued saying “Elliort,” despite the fact that by this point he clearly perceived his own pronunciation to be incorrect. Curiously, within a couple of days, he began accurately pronouncing his name without any difficulty, and he never went back to calling himself “Elliort.” This anecdote powerfully illustrates the interaction between speech perception and production in the development of first language (L1) pronunciation. Elliot could clearly recognize the difference between accurate and inaccurate productions of his name, but he could not perfectly produce it himself. Nor had he previously appeared to notice the mismatch between his own pronunciation and how he perceived others to say his name. This demonstrates that conscious noticing during speech learning can trigger a sudden change in what seemed to be a well-established mispronunciation. It also reveals the importance of input from varied interlocutors, since Elliot was able to accurately imitate his sister’s model, but not my own pronunciation. This was probably not an accident, since her vocal tract size and shape were nearly identical to his own. In learning to accurately perceive phonetic cues associated with particular sounds and words, humans must also learn to normalize what they hear relative to the size and shape of each speaker’s vocal tract (Johnson & Sjerps, 2021). As I will make clear, a similar lag between perception and production is also a feature of second language (L2) pronunciation learning. Furthermore, conscious attention and input from a variety of speakers are important to L2 pronunciation development as well.

In this chapter, I describe how typical L1 pronunciation develops, and apply this knowledge to identifying both similarities and fundamental differences in L2 pronunciation learning. I then discuss critical evidence supporting the benefit of perception-oriented training for L2 pronunciation. Finally, I describe practical implications for pronunciation instruction and recommend perceptually focused resources for teaching and research. For the purpose of this chapter, speech perception refers to the cognitive process by which sounds are heard and categorized. This contrasts with speech production, which refers to the output of the cognitive system, mediated by physical control of speech gestures. Pronunciation is an umbrella term capturing both perception and production processes. I primarily focus on the perception of segments, for which there is a far greater literature, but some of the same principles may extend to suprasegmentals as well.