based on: The 6th LLL conference, UH, 04/20/2002
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk: Speech is in the ear of the listener
and Soczewka 2003
How learners “repair” second language phonology and whether they
may become native speakers.
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk
School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
dkasia@ifa.amu.edu.pl
0. Introduction: identifying a common setting
1. The framework: Natural Linguistics (NL)


Plato; Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Edward Sapir
Natural Phonology (Stampe 1969, Stampe 1979, Donegan and Stampe 1979)
"the conditions of the use of language (performance) are responsible for the nature
of language" (Stampe 1979: 43)
 Natural Linguistics: naturalness in morphology, text, syntax, pragmatics, sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics (e.g. Dressler 1984, 1985, 1990, 1996, 1999) and others
 the tension between clarity of perception and ease of articulation (Donegan and Stampe
1979: 130); processes of contradictory teleologies
 the intention or “Lautabsicht”, the mental phoneme (Baudouin de Courtenay 1895, Sapir
1933)
"they [the underlying segments] are mental representations of sounds which are, at
least in principle, pronounceable" (Stampe 1979: 35)
if a given utterance is naturally pronounceable as the result of a certain intention,
then that intention is a natural perception of the utterance (i.e. a possible
phonological representation) (Donegan and Stampe 1979: 163)
2. Speech is in the ear of the listener
2.1. L1 English – L2 Polish



a Polish word ptak [] 'bird' : [-] ? potato or potential?
"repair" : leads from an unfamiliar intention // to a familiar production []
potato: from an underlying intention (=perception) // to the actual casual
production []
 the learner should intend to say // to arrive at the target []
2.2. L1 Japanese – L2 English



an English word spoon : [-] ? words which begin with a [-] ?
"repair" : leads from an unfamiliar intention /:/ to a familiar production [N]
Japanese has a process of devoicing of high vowels // (realised phonetically as []) and
// in a voiceless environment, e.g. in [] 'shoe', [] 'chopsticks', []
'a little', [] 'season' (first two examples from Shibatani 1987: 865; the other two
from Hasegawa 1979: 127)
 the vowels devoice only when not contiguous to a voiced sound and they do not devoice
when initial or accented
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based on: The 6th LLL conference, UH, 04/20/2002
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk: Speech is in the ear of the listener
and Soczewka 2003

"in slow, deliberate speech, devoicing is less frequent" (Shibatani 1987: 865); "the
formalization of this process is not so simple in slow or careful speech, it is generalized
and simplified in a fast speech context" (Hasegawa 1979: 127):
 the learner should intend to say /N/ to arrive at the pronunciation [N]
 –mashita [-]
 an English loan-word strike : []
2.3. From intention to production

a "repair": a strategy which leads the L2 learner from an unfamiliar intention – a word of
L2, to a familiar production – repaired by suppression of an assumed L2 process
 speaker-friendly processes of casual speech are often articulatorily motivated violations of
language-specific phonotactic structure conditions stored in the lexicon (the violations
take the form of deletions, extensions of assimilations, simplifications)
 the naturalness principle in SLA: provide the learner with an engineered L2 intention
which should lead him/her to an expected L2 pronunciation by means of the
application of his/her natural casual L1 and universal processes
other sources for such engineered intentions:
 emphatic speech (e.g. "Powiedziałam: //, nie //" 'I said code, not cat': this may be
used to teach to pronounce final voiced obstruents in the languages like English)
 allophonic and morphophonemic processes in L1, which may produce L2 intentions for
the learner (e.g. learners can arrive at an L2 phoneme by identifying a process which
derives it from a native string: /+/ = [] = //)
3. Phonostylistics

style in sociolinguistics:
"the variation that occurs in the speech of a single speaker in different situational
contexts" (Cheshire 1992: 324)
 relative formality
 topic, setting and relationship between interlocutors (Hymes 1974)
 formality as a linear continuum from very casual speech to very careful speech according
to the degree of attention given to speech by speakers (Labov 1972)
3.1. What is phonostylistics?





phonostylistics : phonological processes conditioned by style, i.e. style-sensitive or styledependent ones
emphatic: motherese and citation forms
formal: a speech, a lecture, or a job interview
informal: casual, colloquial, intimate; fast, rapid, allegro, casual, connected, informal,
real, spontaneous, or conversational
tempo of speech and attention paid to speech; pragmatics
The main types of phonostylistic processes are:
 assimilations, e.g. of stops and nasals, as in: that pen, good mother, could get, ten men;
palatalization and coalescence, e.g. in: did you, hit you, don’t you, as yet
 reductions, e.g. cluster reductions and degeminations, as in: a test drive, I asked him;
smoothing, as in: hour, lawyer
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based on: The 6th LLL conference, UH, 04/20/2002
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk: Speech is in the ear of the listener
and Soczewka 2003
 hiatus avoidance, e.g. in: law and order; situation
 assimilation + reduction, e.g. in: I can’t go, don’t be silly
 reduction and elision of vowels conditioned by rhythm in iso-accentual, stress-timed
languages, e.g. perhaps
 consonant epenthesis, e.g. in: prin[t]ce, min[t]ce
underlying intention
formal
casual
production
Figure 1. (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1990: 20)
(1)

:
:

he said he wouldn’t go
you sure about next time?
and we didn’t see him again
but perhaps you could give me one
(Sobkowiak 1996: 238)
(2)
And also by using a low impedance you can use two conductors shielded.
Conversational style:
and
 >  > 
also  > 
using  > 
impedance
 >  ,  +  > 
you : >  > 
can
 >  > 
shielded
>,+>
TOTAL: 13 PROCESSES
Reading:
and
 > 
a
 (hypercorrection)
can
 > 
conductors
+>
shielded
>
TOTAL: 7 PROCESSES
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based on: The 6th LLL conference, UH, 04/20/2002
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk: Speech is in the ear of the listener
and Soczewka 2003
(Shockey 1973: 83)
(3)
an example illustrating the CV-preference (Shockey 2003: 42)
And the scientists are always saying that there’s no life on Mars.

VCCCVVCCVCCCVCVCCVCCVCVC CVCCVC CVCC

CVVCVCVCCVCVCV CVCCCV CVCVCVCC
8 consonant clusters  3 consonant clusters
(4)
Pol. to wszystko  [], nie wiem  []
3.2. Phonostylistics in a second language
3.2.1. Difficulties

phonostylistic processes are language-specific (e.g. would [] you, as [] you vs. Polish
*kot [] ją)
 the level of attention in a SL does not drop low enough to trigger a natural application of
casual speech processes
 phonostylistic processes are the most difficult to decode from the non-native language
input (cf. Figure 1 above) -> learning lexicalized versions of utterances with processes
already present in them without the learners realizing this
3.2.2. Experiments





the role of formal vs. natural setting in SLA (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1984, 1985, 1987,
1988, 1989, 1990, see Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1990): productivity in the application of
phonostylistic processes by formal setting learners
statistically significant progress in perception and production of basic casual speech
processes of English in Polish learners due to the regular explicit training in
phonostylistics (Zborowska 1997)
phono-metaphonological training raised substantially the metaphonological awareness of
Spanish school children learning English (Blanco, Carrillo & Gayoso 1999)
students of English found the metalinguistic knowledge they acquired in a descriptive
grammar course very useful in learning practical skills, i.e. in perfecting their performance
(Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Weckwerth and Zborowska 1999)
a perception experiment of gated reduced speech by native and non-native speakers of
English: native listeners unravelled the reductions to arrive at the correct input, non-native
listeners practically did not; the experimental sentence was: The scree[m]play di[n]
resemble the book at all (Linda Shockey 1997)
near-intentional speech = is a formal style (listener-oriented), for which the naturalness
principle defines the obligatory minimum of processes (basically, language-specific
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based on: The 6th LLL conference, UH, 04/20/2002
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk: Speech is in the ear of the listener
and Soczewka 2003
allophonic processes); the learner uses L1 intentions and processes as well as "repair" at the
beginning of acquisition; s/he needs to ultimately learn to hear SL intentions and to apply SL
processes to derive SL productions
average speech = is a casual style (speaker-oriented); this is a style which we use most often
in every-day life; it is correlated with a low level of attention paid to the way of speaking; the
learner hears the strings either as above (here "repair" may be successful if L1 and L2 happen
to have the same casual speech process, e.g. nasal assimilation) or at their "face value" (since
what s/he hears does not match any familiar intention either in L1 or in L2, e.g. palatalization
and coalescence); it's harder to learn to hear the intention here, since it's further removed from
production
4. ”Competences” in the learner’s mind
4.1. L1
4.2. Dialects and other L2’s
4.3. Socio-pragmatics of L2
5. An alternative?
 (South Korea) frenectomy, to correct a condition known as “tongue-tie”, in which the thin
band of tissue under the tongue – the frenulum – extends to the tip; if the tongue cannot
easily touch the roof of the mouth, it’s difficult to pronounce some sounds; the operation
involves a cut in the frenulum
6. A native speaker?
A native speaker
 uses his/her language without hesitation
 pronunciation is only part of the characteristics of a native speaker
 a native speaker's speech may even be accented by a foreign tongue
 to be a native speaker one needs to immerse in the target language environment in
childhood
 it is possible, however, to achieve native-like pronunciation by means of a formal training;
it is exactly phonology which appears to be learnable as opposed to other components of
language, which are too much native-context-dependent
In this talk I have made some suggestions concerning the usefulness of phonological
knowledge in the acquisition of second language pronunciation.
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and Soczewka 2003
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