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Publikace detail

Czech learners’ ability to pronounce schwa in English words

Autoři: Ivanová Jaroslava

Rok: 2015

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Czech learners’ ability to pronounce schwa in English words	Although the very act of the articulation of the R.P. mid central vowel known as the schwa does not cause major difficulties to most Czech university students of English at B2 level, Czechs struggle enormously with its pronunciation both in grammatical words and in content words. Because the schwa is the most frequent phoneme in English, it substantially contributes to the impression that Czech learners speak English with a considerable foreign accent. This presentation aims to investigate whether Czech learners’ ability to pronounce the schwa in weak forms of grammatical words in continuous speech correlates with the pronunciation of the schwa in full-meaning words. We used clinical elicitation (Corder 1973) which made informants (n=25) produce spontaneous data, i.e. an interview structured by four scripted questions. Each performance was recorded by means of software Sound Forge Pro, version 10. The produced samples of students’ speech were analyzed with help of textalyser. The analysis of recordings was carried out using subjective auditory assessment by a university teacher who listened to all tests twice. BBC English and General American as presented in Wells' Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (2008, the Third edition) served as a point of reference. The results show that the relative mean of correctly pronounced instances of weak forms in function words is lower (24.78%, 482 occurrences) than in content words (69.78%, 294 occurrences) and Pearson correlation coefficient (rp=0.3417 ) is not so strong (Chráska 2007, 105). There seems to be a striking difference in the rendition of the schwa in two studied contexts and the cause might be attributed to the interlingual transfer as in Czech there is no such vowel reduction process and to the fact that grammatical words in English are the most frequent ones (cf. 294 equals 60% out of 482).	English schwa; function and content words; Czech university students; spontaneous speech