The Role of Temporal and Spectral Cues in Non-native Speech Production:

Bangla Speakers’ L2 English Tense and Lax Vowels

Abstract

This study investigated the role of durational and spectral cues in second language tense and lax vowel contrasts produced by non-native speakers. To test previous claims that speakers primarily rely on durational cues over spectral cues to distinguish L2 tense and lax vowel pairs, citation style speech data were collected from 16 native speakers of Bangla; participants were all undergraduate students. The data were collected via a shadowing task where participants listened to a carefully constructed list of English words in random order and repeated each word immediately after they heard them. The utterances were recorded via a Zoom H1n voice recorder. Collected speech data were annotated and processed using the phonetic analysis software Praat and the semi-automatic annotation toolkit DARLA; statistical analyses were performed using R statistical computing software. Results indicate that Bangla speakers do not emphasize on durational cues to differentiate English tense-lax vowel pairs, contrary to the general patterns reported from other languages; rather, they prefer the spectral cues over the durational cues.