Abstract
Sounding native in one's L2 remains an almost unachievable goal for many adult learners. Since perceived foreign accent stems not only from phoneme divergences but also from phonetic inaccuracies, the speech of L2 users can be judged as strongly accented despite of being highly intelligible (Munro & Derwing, 1995, Language Learning ; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition). Sounding foreign can have consequences for the L2 speakers' status in the target society, and therefore phonetic training methods are needed that would decrease the L1 accent in the learner's L2 speech.
We focus on L1 Russian learners of L2 Czech. The speech patterning of Russian and Czech differ in a number of salient aspects, such as word stress position and realization, role of vowel length, and consonant palatalization, and these account for the characteristic Russian accent in Czech.
To determine the most salient markers of Russian accent in Czech, 10 Russian learners (5 f, mean age = 19 years, mean LOR = 1.6 years) were recorded reading a Czech passage and this material was used in a subsequent perception test. Native Czech listeners (n = 44) first rated the extent of foreign accent and then listed the speech phenomena which in their opinion revealed the non-Czech origin of the speakers. The mean scalar ratings of accentedness strongly correlated with the total count of deviations that the native judges commented on (ρ = 0.83, p= 0.003). The most frequently noticed deviations pertained to the position and phonetic implementation of word stress (lengthening of stressed syllables and reduction of unstressed ones), and, relatedly, to vowel quantity contrasts. Word stress was previously reported as a predictor of high accentedness rating for other L1-L2 language pairs, namely for L1 English speakers of L2 German (O'Brien, 2014, Language Learning), and for L2 English speakers with various L1s (Kang, 2010, System). Since in our experiment, the Russian learners' non-native implementation of various phonetic cues associated with word stress was particularly salient to native Czech listeners, in a subsequent experiment we examined how naïve Russian listeners perceive Czech word-level stress.
As a next step towards developing an appropriate L2 speech training method we test how word stress in Czech is perceived by naïve Russian listeners in different contexts (when syllables do and do not differ in duration). We designed a perception test, in which listeners hear two- and three-syllabic non-existing words (e.g. [sapa]-[saːpa]-[sapaː]-[saːpaː]) produced by a native Czech speaker, and their task is to mark a syllable, which they consider to be stressed. Data collection is now underway and the results will be presented at the conference. The findings will help us understand which cues, besides vowel duration, Russian speakers use to determine the position of word stress. This will in turn help us design a teaching method that will enable them to perceive and learn the cues for word stress in Czech.