The Perception of Fronted /u/ by Dutch Learners of English - An Exploratory Study

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THE PERCEPTION OF FRONTED /u/ BY DUTCH LEARNERS OF

ENGLISH – AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Eva Swaalf

10001760 / 6284418 Master Thesis

University of Amsterdam Department of English

Linguistics of European Languages: Specialization English Dr. Silke Hamann

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1. Introduction

On the way hypocorrection has caused fronted /u/ to become the norm and

how the sound may exist in perception.

Second language (L2) learners require input to build up a grammar which is referred to as the ‘interlanguage’: a grammar which in initial stages of learning depends mostly on first language (L1) and universal features, but which is supplemented more and more with L2 features (Major 2001). In most theories in second language acquisition (SLA) research, input is given a prominent role: generativist accounts, for instance, stress its importance in switching parameters (White 2007), and associative-cognitive accounts argue that input is necessary to build and strengthen connections built up in the memory (Ellis 2007). In learning the phonology and phonetics of an L2, learners have to create knowledge of the exact positions of the articulators and the phoneme inventory of the L2.

1.1 /u/-Fronting by English Speakers

In recent years, the input that is given to learners of English contains a change referred to as /u/-fronting. Different studies have found that in the past decades, /u/ is “fronted”: its average second formant (F2) frequency, which indicates how front or back a vowel is, has increased significantly and has come close to the average frequency of the front vowel /i/. Harrington et

al. (2000) conducted a real time analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts in the 50s, late

60s/early 70s and 80s, and found that the F2 frequency of /u/ has increased: the Queen’s /u/s were produced more front in the 1980s than in the 1950s. Hawkins & Midgley (2005) conducted an apparent time analysis of Standard Southern British (SSB) vowel formant frequencies and studied the speech of RP speakers of four age groups (65-73, 50-55, 35-40, and 20–25) and compared these to see how the vowels have changed. The F2 frequencies of /u/ that were found were, respectively, 994 Hz, 1112 Hz, 1336 Hz and 1616 Hz. These studies show that over the years, the average F2 frequency of /u/ has increased.

/u/-Fronting is not a British phenomenon, as different studies focusing on different English dialects have found an increase of F2 values as well. Easton & Bauer (2010) present a comparison of different acoustic studies (Wells 1963, Deterding 1997, Bernard 1989, Watson

et al. 1998, Hall 1976, Maclagan 1982) in which the vowels of SSB, Australian and New

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and New Zealand English, /u/ has moved to a more front position in the past decade. Koops (2010) focused on /u/-fronting in American English, and argues that there is even a difference between two types of fronted /u/ within the country: Southern fronted /u/, which was found first in the mid-1800s, and mainstream fronted /u/, which arose around the same time it arose in the other English dialects (Koops 2010: 119). So no matter which dialect of English L2 learners have as input, the variants of /u/ will all be fronted.

1.2 Coarticulation

Fronting of /u/ used to be merely the result of a phonetic process known as coarticulation, in which the context of a sound influences its actual realisation. It is often the result of ease of effort and can be found mostly in running speech. The process mostly affects sound patterns in which the phonemes differ greatly in acoustic and articulatory properties, for instance when the place and manner of articulation are highly different. A clear example of this is nasal assimilation in Dutch in the word |ɪn+pɑkən| (inpakken, ‘to wrap up’): it is effortful to produce both /n/ and /p/ clearly in this sound pattern since [n] is an alveolar nasal sound and [p] is a bilabial plosive. As a result, Dutch speakers assimilate the two sounds, and produce the word as [ɪmpɑkən]: alveolar [n] is changed to bilabial [m], so that the place of articulation of the nasal and the plosive are equal. Coarticulation is a synchronic sound change, because it is a phonetic process which occurs as a result of lenition and not as a result of new norms in sound production within a speech community.

/u/-fronting can be considered a synchronic sound change when it is merely caused by coarticulation. In the coarticulation of /u/, which should be produced with a low F2 value, the F2 value of /u/ is raised to make the transition from a sound with a high F2 value to this vowel easier. Harrington et al. (2008) argue that coronal consonants, which are consonants produced at the front of the mouth and therefore have a high F2 value, result in the coarticulation of the back vowel. These patterns, in which a coronal consonant and the back vowel /u/ are situated close or next to each other, can be found in many different languages, which makes /u/-fronting in this synchronic way not restricted to English. Indeed, as Oh (2001) shows, it can be found in languages such as German, Chinese and French as well. Synchronic /u/-fronting, then, can be considered a universal process as it is the mere result of a physiological or articulatory constraint.

In L2 production, it would be logical that learners show synchronic /u/-fronting in a similar way as native speakers: as it is caused by physiological restrictions, one might think that there are no differences in the way in which native speakers and learners coarticulate

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sounds. Moreover, one would think that the way in which L1 and L2 sounds are coarticulated by learners would not differ. Oh (2001), however, argues that these differences do exist. She studied the coarticulation of /u/ by German, Chinese and French L2 learners of English. These participants all have the vowel /y/ in their native phonological system. Oh (2001) hypothesised that this vowel would influence the coarticulation of /u/ in their native language production, because in order to keep /y/ and /u/ distinct categories, coarticulation of /u/ is much more restricted in the native languages of the participants than in English. The results confirmed that the speakers indeed showed more fronting of /u/ in English than in their native language production. It was shown, then, that though coarticulation is a universal process, its actual effects are dependent on phoneme inventory.

Apart from the difference in coarticulation of /u/ between the production of L1 and L2 sounds, Oh (2001) also found that proficiency played a significant role in the production of fronted /u/. When producing English sentences, the more proficient learners showed more fronting than the less proficient learners. Oh (2001) concluded that coarticulation, therefore, is learnt: learners do not automatically coarticulate in the same way as native speakers, but learn how to do so. This view is similar to the view of Schouten (1975), who proposed that both phonological and phonetic processes are language specific. On the basis of this, we might conclude that Dutch learners of English also learn to front their /u/s in English. Swaalf (2014) found evidence for this: in a production study, the speech of 6 Dutch learners of English was measured. The speakers were asked to produce English and Dutch sentences containing the vowel /u/. When comparing the F2 frequencies of the vowels in the sentences, it was clear that the learners produced /u/ with much higher frequencies in English than in Dutch, thus showing that they had learnt that /u/ is much more front in English.

1.3 Hypocorrection

Synchronic /u/ fronting is different from diachronic /u/-fronting, which was found by for instance Harrington et al. (2008). In recent years, Harrington et al. (2008) argue, /u/-fronting is not found solely in coronal contexts, but in non-coronal contexts as well. The reason for this, they argue, is perceptual. They argue that in English, most /u/s are situated in coronal contexts. Most of the input listeners receive, then, will have a fronted version of /u/ rather than the ‘normal’ back version. When listeners become speakers, then, they will use information gained from the input to produce sounds (Ohala 1981). Since most of the /u/s listeners will have perceived had high F2 values, as Harrington et al. (2008) argue, listeners will assume the front values to be the ‘normal’ values: they do not associate the fronting with

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coarticulation, but assume it is the correct phonetic variant of the vowel /u/.

The process in which listeners fail to associate coarticulated or otherwise distorted sounds is referred to as hypocorrection (Ohala 1981). Ohala (1981) argues that listeners are able to relate specific distorted phonetic forms with specific phonetic or phonological processes. Dutch listeners who hear [ɪmpɑkən], for instance, will be able to ‘undo’ the distortion caused by the nasal assimilation and will map it onto the lexical form |ɪn+pɑkən|. Listeners might also, however, fail to associate distorted phonetic forms with the distorting processes that changed them. In this case, the listeners assume the distortion to be the correct form rather than a variant of a specific phoneme: they assume fronted /u/ to be the correct phonetic form of the phoneme /u/. Harrington et al. (2008) conducted a perceptual experiment and compared the perception of fronted /u/ by an old and a young generation of British listeners. They found that there indeed is a difference in the way the two generations perceive front /u/ stimuli: the perceptual boundary between /i/ and/u/ of the young listeners was much more front than that of the older listeners. Harrington et al. (2008) argue that this difference in perception, which is the result of hypocorrection, leads younger generations of English speakers to produce the phoneme with higher F2 frequencies than the older generations.

Since hypocorrection is a perceptual process and is dependent on the input listeners receive, it might be argued that the same process happens in the perception of fronted /u/ by L2 learners as well. As mentioned above, L2 learners use L2 input to construct their interlanguage. The learners are aware of processes such as coarticulation from their L1, and may use these processes in their L2 speech in the same way as in their L1. Beginning learners of English, such as those in Oh’s (2001) study, coarticulate /u/ in English in the same way as they coarticulate the sound in their native language. However, from the input they receive, the learners may gather that in English, /u/ is usually produced with high F2 values. They may assume, then, that fronted /u/ is the normal phonetic form of /u/ and hypocorrect the sound in the same way as the listeners in Harrington et al.’s (2008) experiment.

1.4 Thesis Topic and Structure

Though /u/-fronting is a change in the perception of the phoneme /u/, it has not resulted in a change in mapping by English listeners: they assume fronted /u/ to be the correct phonetic form of the underlying category. The fronting of /u/ in English has not led to any conflicts with any other high vowels, since the only other high vowel is /i/, which, unlike /u/, is a spread vowel. In Dutch, on the other hand, like in German, French and Chinese, this conflict

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learn how to properly front their /u/s when speaking English. Dutch speakers seem to be able to produce /u/ more fronted in English than in Dutch, as Swaalf (2014) has found. Dutch speakers thus seemed to have picked up that English /u/ has higher F2 values. The question is, however, as which phoneme fronted /u/ is perceived: do learners who are aware of this front rounded high vowel from their L1 perceive fronted /u/ as the front or as the back vowel?

In this thesis, a study is presented which investigates this issue. A study was designed that focused on the perception of fronted /u/ by Dutch learners. In this study, participants, who were all graduate or undergraduate students of the bachelor English Language & Culture, were presented with the vowel /u/ as produced by an English speaker from Southampton. They were asked which Dutch sound the vowel they heard resembled most. The study was mainly exploratory, and the main question to be answered was: do the participants match fronted /u/ with Dutch /y/ most of the time or with Dutch /u/?

Three hypotheses were designed which could account for the results. The first hypothesis, H1, was that most of the participants matched fronted /u/ with Dutch /u/. If this is the case, this would mean that the learners ‘ignore’ their L1 knowledge and perceive fronted /u/ in the same way as the younger participants in Harrington et al. (2008). This would suggest, thus, that learners have hypocorrected fronted /u/ in the same way native English listeners have done. The second hypothesis, H2, focuses on the opposite result, namely that most of the participants match fronted /u/ with the Dutch phoneme /y/. If this is the case, this means that the L1 of the participants influences their L2 perception. The third hypothesis, H3, assumes that the responses of learners will be divided, and that both /y/ and /u/ will be chosen equally often. This would indicate that some confusion exists and that the learners may be unsure whether fronted /u/ is a front or a back vowel.

The following chapter will give an overview of the theories in second language phonology learning which are relevant for this thesis. The ideas on the influence of the L1 phonological system on L2 perception of Polivanov (1931) and Trubetzkoy (1971) will be discussed, as will Strange’s (2007) idea of automatic selective perception. The models on L2 category acquisition by Best (1995) and Flege (1981) will be used as a theoretical basis. In chapter 3, then, the study that was carried out for this thesis will be presented, in which an attempt will be made to identify certain tendencies in the perception of fronted /u/ by Dutch learners of English.

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2. Distinguishing L2 Phonemes

On the influence of the L1 on the acquisition of L2 phonological categories.

Harrington et al. (2008) discovered that there was a difference in the way /u/ is perceived by old listeners and by young listeners: young listeners have accepted fronted /u/ as a standard production of the category /u/. The fronted sound has not merged with any other category because there is no rounded vowel in the front area of the English vowel space with which the sound can merge. Languages which do have a rounded vowel in this area, however, seem to prevent /u/ from moving to this area in order to maintain the contrast between the vowels /y/ and /u/. Speakers of such languages do not produce /u/ with high F2 frequencies because that would result in them being misunderstood by listeners. The listeners, in turn, never receive input in which /u/ is fronted in the same way as English /u/: they do not learn to associate /u/ with such high frequencies. The question is, then, what happens when learners of English as a second language have to learn to associate the fronted sound with the back category /u/: will they fail to do so, and perceive the sound as a variant of the category /y/ instead, or will they succeed and behave in the same way as young English listeners in Harrington et al.’s (2008) study. In this chapter, it will be discussed to what extent the L1 of learners influences their L2 perception, and how categories are established in the interlanguage.

2.1 Perception of Phonemes

When listeners perceive sound streams, they use their knowledge of their phonological system to distinguish sound segments. When listeners perceive sounds, they map uncategorised phonetic forms onto specific phonological categories or phonemes. These phonemes are abstract categories stored in the memory which together form the phonemic inventory of a language. In categorisation, listeners use acoustic cues to see to which phonological category a phonetic signal corresponds. These acoustic cues are based on the position of articulators while producing sounds and the presence or absence of vibration of the vocal folds. In the production of vowels, for instance, a high and front positioning of the tongue-tip results in a low F1 frequency and a high F2 frequency, which are then used as acoustic cues to distinguish which vowel is produced. An English listener may for instance perceive a vowel with a high F2 value and a low F1 value as a high front vowel such as /i/. Listeners thus use acoustic or phonetic details to indicate which category a sound belongs to.

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Speakers may produce sounds in numerous ways, but not all variants are meaning distinctive. According to Ohala (1981), sounds have an “unlimited number of measurably different phonetic variations” (179): their production is not always the same, but always contains slight or even miniscule differences. The formant frequencies of a vowel, for instance, may be slightly different every time it is produced: /i/ may, for instance, be produced with an F2 value of 2400 Hz the one time and 2350 the other time. Phonemes allow for this slight variation, as long as it does not extend the threshold of differentiation (Polivanov 1931). This threshold, which can also be referred to as a category boundary, is the boundary between what is accepted as belonging to the one phonological category and what is accepted as belonging to another one which is next to it. When a speaker intends to produce /ɔ/, for instance, she must make sure the F1 frequency of the sound that is produced is not close to 700 Hz, as it might then be confused with the category /ɒ/. When two phonetic signals differ in quality but both fall within the boundaries of one specific category, the two will both be perceived as the same phonological unit. The difference between the two, then, is merely phonetic and not phonological: when interchanging the two sounds, no difference in meaning is created. When two distinct phonetic signals fall within different categories, their difference is phonological: they belong to different meaning distinctive categories. When this is the case, they can be used to form minimal pairs such as /guːs/ (goose) and /giːs/ (geese): their contrast influences communication.

2.2 The L1 Filter

The phonemes stored in the memory of a language user form the phoneme inventory of the language this person speaks. Though certain sounds can be found in all languages, they are not always identified as the same phonemes: the one language may consider a specific sound as a variant of one category, whereas the other distinguishes it from this category. In English, for instance, the glottal stop can be found in speech as the result of /t/-dropping, resulting in /lɛtə/ (letter) being produced as [lɛʔə]. It is not, however, considered to be a separate phoneme, as it does not contrast with for instance /t/ or /h/: listeners will map the sound onto the phoneme /t/. In languages such as Arabic, however, the glottal stop is considered to be meaning distinctive and does contrast with other consonants. The phoneme inventory influences the category boundaries and the leeway of variation that exists within a category: the more phonemes a language has, the less variation a phoneme is allowed to have. The fact that less fronting of /u/ is allowed in German, French and Chinese compared to English (Oh 2001), for instance, is due to the fact that the category /y/ prevents /u/ from fronting too much:

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if /u/ is realised with an F2 value that is too high, it may be perceived as /y/ instead of /u/. In English, on the other hand, this conflict does not exist, resulting in /u/ being allowed to be realised with a very high F2 value. Listeners of the one language may thus perceive sounds differently than listeners of the other language.

When language users perceive non-native speech sounds, they use the phonological system of their first language (L1) to categorise sounds. Polivanov (1931) argues that listeners are biased by their L1, as they will interpret sounds using their phonological system: listeners do not perceive phonetic segments as they are, but perceive sounds as categories. Listeners use the category boundaries from their L1 to perceive sounds, and will fail to notice that L2 categories might have different boundaries. Trubetzkoy (1971) argues that the L1 phonology functions as a sieve through which these non-native sounds are filtered. Polivanov (1931) showed that Japanese learners of Russian will fail to perceive the word tak (‘thus’) as /tak/, but will perceive the sound stream as /taku/ instead: the Japanese language has a phonotactic rule stored in their phonology which does not allow them to have the consonant /k/ in word-final position, and which leads Japanese learners to ‘hallucinate’ the vowel /u/ into the word. Trubetzkoy (1971) gives the example of Russian learners of German, who transfer their knowledge of /i/ following palatalised consonants only to their perception of German speech sounds: they will perceive German consonants that precede /i/ as being palatalised even if these may be unpalatalised in German, because their L1 knowledge does not allow them to perceive the consonant otherwise. They will thus perceive the German word sieben (‘seven’) not as /siːbən/ but as /sjiːbən/.

As mentioned in chapter 1, people who learn an L2 construct an interlanguage (IL) when doing so. In initial stages, this IL depends on the L1 and contains a great deal of first

language transfer, which can be positive or negative (Major 2001). Positive language transfer

occurs when an L2 segment is identical to a segment in the L1, and the learner can use her knowledge of the L1 category to perceive and produce the L2 category. Negative language transfer, however, occurs when there are differences between L1 and L2 segments or when a category is not shared between the L1 and L2. Strange (2007, 2010) argues that negative language transfer is due to the fact that language learners have learnt to automatically associate certain acoustic cues with certain categories. When language users learn their L1, they store their categories in their long-term memory and create procedural routines to quickly associate the knowledge in the long-term memory with incoming input. Language users thus learn what Strange (2007) terms selective perceptual routines (SPRs) to quickly identify sounds as certain phonemes without having to actively process the incoming sounds. When

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perceiving L2 sounds, then, learners automatically use these SPRs to identify the categories that are produced by speakers. Without being completely aware of it, the learners treat L2 sounds as being L1 categories. For this reason, Russian learners automatically associate /iː/ with palatalised consonants, and Japanese learners automatically perceive word-final syllables as existing of a consonant and a vowel.

2.3 Equivalence Classification

When L2 learners perceive L2 sounds, they use their knowledge of the L1 phonology which determines how specific phonetic forms must be associated with specific phonological categories. Best (1995), however, argues that when these learners perceive L2 sounds, they do not perceive them as being categories, but that they perceive the phonetic form of the sound as it is. She argues that when learners perceive L2 sounds, they use their knowledge of L1 sounds to identify them as meaningful speech sounds. In order to be able to identify L2 phonetic forms as specific sounds, the learner first has to be able to perceive the sounds as speech sounds. It may be the case, for instance, that a learner perceives a sound like a Zulu click as a non-speech sound, and therefore fails to associate it with any of the speech sounds that are stored in the memory. If learners are able to distinguish sounds as speech sounds, the learner then has to be able to categorise them as being specific known sounds. If this the case, it might then happen that the learner perceptually assimilates the L2 sound with an L1 sound, which may be correct if the two sounds are similar or incorrect if they in fact belong to different categories.

Perceptual assimilation, then, is the process in which an L2 sound is assimilated with an L1 sound. When perceiving L2 sounds, as Best (1995) argues, learners will base categorisation on the relative distance towards known sounds. When the L2 sound is perceived to be close to a sound stored in the memory, the learner will assimilate the L2 sound with the familiar L1 sound. When a learner perceives two non-native sounds which in the L2 belong to two different phonological categories but which exist in the L1 as only one category, the learner will again assimilate the sounds with sounds in the grammar that are closest. Best (1995) argues that learners may then perceive the sounds as versions of the same sound, in which case the two may be perceived as for instance a good and a bad exemplar of the familiar sound. In perceiving the Zulu contrast /k/-/k’/, for instance, Best (1995) showed that English listeners would assimilate both with their category /k/. It may also be the case that learners assimilate a contrast with two different L1 categories: English listeners would assimilate the Zulu contrast /ɬ/-/ɮ̈/ with a voiceless coronal fricative and a voiced fricative.

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Best (1995) argues that listeners do not perceive categories but that they perceive phonetic forms. This goes against the theories of Polivanov (1931) and Trubetzkoy (1971), who focus more on the influence of L1 phonology on L2 perception: in their theories, it is assumed that learners base their perception on abstract categories stored in the grammar. In this view, as argued above, phonemes have a certain leeway of phonetic variation which might differ between languages. In the perception of L2 sounds, then, learners do not measure the difference between the perceived L2 sound and a known L1 phonetic form, as Best (1995) proposed, but between the L2 sound and a known L1 phoneme. Flege (1981) does not share Best’s (1995) view that perception is based on phonetics, but argues that the assimilation occurs between L2 and L1 phonemes. Flege’s (1981) Speech Learning Model assumes that learners do not calculate the phonetic distance between perceived sounds and known sounds, but that when they perceive L2 sounds, they measure the equivalence of the sound to any of the known L1 phonemes.

According to the Speech Learning Model, learners can perceive L2 sounds as being identical to an L1 phoneme, being similar to an L1 phoneme, or being an entirely new sound. When the L2 and L1 share a phoneme which differs phonetically, Flege (1981) assumes that learners will fail to store the L2 phonetic qualities of the sound in the interlanguage grammar: the learner will associate the phoneme with the L1 phonetics and will store the phoneme with these qualities rather than those of the L2. This, according to Flege (1981), explains why French learners of English, for instance, produce English /u/ with lower F2 than native speakers of English: the learners use the French phonetic qualities of /u/, which are of course more back than in English.

Flege (1981) argues that it may also be the case that the learner assumes an L2 phoneme to be similar to an L1 phoneme, though they are actually two different categories. In his study, Flege (1981) investigated the production of French /y/ and /u/ and English /u/ by French learners of English and inexperienced and experienced English learners of French. Flege (1981) found that the inexperienced English learners of French failed to distinguish /y/ and /u/ in their production of English. Surprisingly, this group of learners produced the French rounded vowels with an F2 frequency that was higher than the frequency with which they produced /u/ in their native language. Flege (1981) argued that the learners might have mistaken /y/ to be the correct form of /u/, and therefore produced both /y/ and /u/ as a front vowel. Though the inexperienced learners failed to distinguish /y/ and /u/, the experienced learners were able to do so. In the study, the experienced learners of French were able to produce /y/ with native-like qualities, though they produced /u/ with qualities that were more

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English than French. Flege (1981) argued that the learners had learnt that /y/ is a new category, and since there is no English category with which /y/ could be assimilated, the English were able to store the correct phonetic qualities of the phoneme in their grammar. They failed to produce /u/ with native-like qualities, because they assimilated the sound with their native category /u/ and stored the L1 phonetic qualities of the phoneme in their IL.

The French participants in Flege’s (1981) study failed to front their /u/s, with which they contrast with the Dutch participants in Swaalf (2014), who succeeded in doing so. This might be due to the fact that Flege’s (1981) participants were not exposed to input in which the frequencies of /u/ in English were as high as they are now: they might not have noticed that there is a difference between the phonetic qualities of English /u/ and French /u/, and might have perceived the two sounds to be similar. The fact that the Dutch learners in Swaalf (2014) were able to produce English /u/ with high F2 values might be due to the fact that they have been exposed to input which does contain /u/s with these high F2 frequencies: since learners use input to construct their IL grammar, the learners might have learnt to produce /u/ with high F2 values in their production of English. Though Swaalf (2014) showed that there clearly is a tendency for Dutch learners of English to produce /u/ as a front vowel which is different from the French learners in Flege (1981), it is unclear whether the perception of the learners in both studies is different as well. Both studies focused on the production of the back vowel and cannot be used to indicate how the learners perceive the back vowel: they do not provide any information as to whether the learners perceive fronted /u/ as being the back vowel /u/ or whether the learners actually relate the sound to the front category /y/ with which is also shares quite some acoustic resemblances.

2.4 Proficiency and Noticing

In order to accurately perceive L2 phonemes, learners may have to learn that the L2 may have more phonological categories and that the use of different acoustic cues may be required. Levy & Strange (2008) focused on the perception of English learners of the French phonemes /u/ and /y/, like Flege (1981), but used a perceptual experiment to test how these learners categorise the sounds. The participants in the study, who were divided into an experienced and an inexperienced group, were given an AXB discrimination task and a category goodness judgement task to see whether they noticed a difference between /y/ and /u/, and whether they considered the sounds good or bad exemplars of either of the categories. The results showed that the inexperienced learners merged /y/ with /u/, but classified it as a bad exemplar of /u/. The experienced learners, however, were able to classify /y/ as a separate phoneme. The study

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supported Flege’s (1981) theory that new categories can be learned, and showed that the change in production of /y/ found by Flege (1981) accompanies a change in perception.

When learners become aware of new categories in their learning process, they become aware of the acoustic cues that native listeners of the L2 they are learning use to discriminate speech sounds. Guion & Pederson (2007) presented two studies that focus on the acquisition of L2 speech sounds, the first of which focused on the way experienced L2 learners learn to use the proper acoustic cues in discrimination. In their study, they focused on the perception of tone by English learners of Mandarin. They found that advanced learners had learnt to use the slope of the fundamental frequency as an acoustic cue to discriminate speech segments, which is used by native Mandarin listeners as well. Inexperienced learners, on the other hand, failed to use this cue, since this cue is not used in English and is therefore not part of an SPR in the categorisation of sounds. Proficiency, thus, results in better production and better perception: learners become aware of the phoneme inventory of the L2 and the acoustic cues that they must use to discriminate L2 phonemes.

Though increased experience with the L2 language results in better perception of L2 sounds, exposure to a great amount of input is not the only reason learners learn to perceive new L2 sounds. Schmidt (1990) argues that in second language acquisition, input does not always result in intake: perceiving numerous sentences with French /y/ does not result in English learners of French automatically acquiring the sound as a new phoneme. For this, Schmidt (1990) argues, noticing is required: learners have to notice there is a gap in their knowledge of the L2 which does not enable them to account for certain linguistic phenomena. English learners of French, thus, have to notice the French sound /y/ is not the same as the category /u/ in order to be able to distinguish the two sounds. Before a change in the production of a phoneme by a speaker occurs, then, a change in the perception of the phoneme must occur: being able to notice a difference would result in different production of sounds. It might be argued, then, that the Dutch participants in Swaalf (2014) had noticed English /u/ is produced differently than Dutch /u/.

Though Schmidt’s (1990) focus is not particularly on L2 phonology acquisition, there is support that in this acquisition process noticing plays an important role. In their second study, Guion & Pederson (2007) focused on the acquisition of Hindi contrasts by English listeners who had no experience with the language. They hypothesised that when the participants’ attention was focused on the forms they were presented, this would stimulate their ability to discriminate non-native sounds. When the participants’ attention was focused on meaning of words, this would not stimulate discrimination. Their study showed that the participants

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whose attention was focused on form were indeed better at discriminating a L2 pairs which could not be mapped onto L1 pairs than the participants whose attention was focused on meaning. This indicated that the successful participants had noticed the difference between for instance the sound pair /t̪h/-/ʈh/, which, as Guion & Pederson (2007) argue, is difficult for English listeners to perceive since they are both equally similar to the English phoneme /t/. Though Guion & Pederson (2007) argue that more research on noticing is necessary to really see its effects, their study does indicate that noticing a perceptual difference plays an important role in the acquisition of new sounds.

2.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, it has been argued that when L2 learners build up their IL and learn the L2 phonological system, they first base their perception on the phonology of their L1. Sounds that are different in the L2 are related to L1 phonemes. Learners can become aware of phonological differences when they notice there is a gap in their IL grammar. If they do so, they can create new phonological categories, which will then be produced with native-like phonetic qualities.

If Dutch learners would perceptually assimilate fronted /u/ with a known Dutch category, it is logical that they would assimilate it with their category /y/: phonetically, fronted /u/ is closer to this category than to their native category /u/. In Dutch, the average F2 frequencies of male and female speakers are, respectively, 953 Hz and 1047 Hz for /u/ and 1697 Hz and 2031 Hz for /y/ (Van Leussen et al. 2011). If we compare these findings to Hawkins & Midgley’s (2005) results, who indicate that the average F2 frequency of 20-25 years old male speakers of RP (who by now are 30-35 years old) is 1616 Hz, it would be likely to assume, if Best (1995) is correct, that fronted /u/ would assimilate with Dutch /y/. This would then support the second hypothesis that was introduced in the previous chapter, which states that the participants in the study will perceive most of the sounds as variants of Dutch /y/.

The participants in Swaalf (2014) were all able to front /u/s and produced the English sound neither with the same phonetic features as Dutch /u/ nor with the same features as Dutch /y/: on average, the female participants produced English /u/ with an F2 frequency of 1690 Hz and the male participants with a frequency of 1491 Hz. These frequencies neither correspond with Van Leussen et al.’s (2011) findings of Dutch /u/ nor of Dutch /y/: they fall somewhere in the middle. This might indicate, then, that the learners have noticed that the English vowel is different from the two Dutch categories. It might be the case, then, that the

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learners perceive the sound as a new vowel, which is different from both Dutch /u/ and /y/. In this case, the participants might find it difficult to relate the sound to a Dutch category. Since fronted /u/ is an ambiguous sound which is neither really similar to Dutch /y/ or to Dutch /u/ but can be argued to be situated somewhere in between these two categories, close to the categorical boundary between them, it may be the case that great variation between /u/- and /y/-responses occurs. The participants may then not be completely sure to which of the two Dutch sounds fronted /u/ resembles most, and their response may simply be a guess between the two response categories. If this is the case, the third hypothesis is supported.

It might also be the case, however, that they assume the sound to be a variant of the back vowel /u/, in which case they would behave in the same way as the young listeners in Harrington et al. (2008). The results found by Swaalf (2014) show that the Dutch speakers fronted their /u/s, but the average F2 frequency of the male participants that were found was still lower than the average frequency of English /u/ produced by young speakers, as found by Hawkins & Midgley (2001). This might indicate that Dutch /u/ does somehow affect the production of English /u/, as the Dutch version of the category is produced with lower frequency. In this case, it might be assumed that the participants in the study will map fronted /u/ onto the Dutch category /u/, which would support the first hypothesis.

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3. The Study

On the perception of fronted /u/ by Dutch learners of English.

3.1 Methods

This chapter presents the study that was conducted to investigate how fronted /u/ is perceived by Dutch learners of English. The study is focused on the perception of English nonsense words containing fronted /u/ by Dutch graduate and undergraduate students of the BA English Language & Culture at the University of Amsterdam. A set of 40 monosyllabic stimuli in /CV(V)C/ contexts was made, in which 10 contained the vowel /u/, 10 contained the diphthong /ei/, 10 the vowel /o/ and 10 the vowel /i/. To see whether coronal context had any effect on perception, half of the consonantal contexts of the stimuli were in a coronal context and half of them in a non-coronal context. The /u/-stimuli were the target stimuli and the other stimuli were distracters. The stimuli were nonsense words, so that lexical effects would not influence the perception of the vowels. The stimuli were produced by a 24-year old female native speaker of English from Southampton, whose speech was recorded in a soundproof room at one of the UvA buildings. The speaker was asked to produce the stimuli four times, and from these productions the best stimuli, of which the pitch was most stable and similar to the other stimuli, were chosen.

3.1.1 The Stimuli

Both the F1 and F2 values of all recorded /u/-stimuli were analysed using Praat (2014). In order to measure the vowel frequencies, a selection was made in the spectrogram in which the vowel formants were clearly visible (see Figure 1 in the appendix for an example). The average frequencies in these selections were measured and are listed in Table 1 below. In order to indicate whether the /u/s in the stimuli are indeed fronted and whether the /u/s are phonetically closer to /y/ or /u/ in Dutch, the results were compared to the findings of Deterding (1995) and Van Leussen et al. (2011). Deterding (1995) measured the vowel frequencies of female SSB speakers and found an average F1 frequency of 410 Hz and an average F2 of 1340 Hz for /u/. Van Leussen et al. (2011) studied the vowel frequencies of female Dutch speakers and found averages of 389 Hz and 1047 Hz for the F1 and F2 of /u/, and 325 Hz and 2031 Hz for /y/. The comparison of the recorded stimuli with these findings can be found in Table 1. In the table, it is indicated what the differences between the

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measured frequencies and the frequencies found in the two studies are.

Table 1: Measured Formant Frequencies and Comparisons with Deterding (1995) and Van Leussen et al. (2011)

Difference in Hz Measured

frequencies in Hz

Deterding (1995) Van Leussen et

al. (2011): /u/ Van Leussen et al. (2011): /y/ Coronals Toot F1 434 + 24 + 45 + 109 F2 2221 + 881 + 1174 + 109 Foos F1 430 + 20 + 41 + 105 F2 2076 + 736 + 1029 + 45 Soom F1 460 + 50 + 71 + 135 F2 2025 + 685 + 978 - 6 Shoon F1 587 + 177 + 198 + 262 F2 2192 + 832 + 1145 + 161 Thood F1 405 - 5 + 198 + 80 F2 2009 + 669 + 962 - 22 Non-coronals Gook F1 323 - 87 - 66 - 2 F2 1941 + 631 + 894 - 90 Fook F1 321 - 89 - 68 - 4 F2 1718 + 378 + 671 - 313 Moog F1 405 - 5 + 16 + 80 F2 1932 + 592 + 885 - 99 Koom F1 381 - 29 - 8 + 56 F2 1625 + 285 + 578 - 406 Mook F1 469 + 59 + 80 + 144 F2 1940 + 600 + 893 - 91

The comparison of the stimuli with the findings of Deterding (1995) and Van Leussen et

al. (2011) showed that all /u/-stimuli contained fronted /u/ and that the average frequency is

closer to Dutch /y/ than to Dutch /u/. All stimuli had F2 values which were higher than the frequency found for English /u/ by Deterding (1995), suggesting that they are produced with more front qualities than the SSB speakers in Deterding’s (1995) study. The differences between the F2 frequencies of the stimuli and the average F2 frequency found for Dutch /y/ by Van Leussen et al. (2011) is smaller than the differences between the frequency found for Dutch /u/, which indicates that the vowels in the stimuli are closer to Dutch /y/ than to Dutch /u/. If we expect the learners to associate high frequencies with the Dutch category /y/ rather than the Dutch category /u/, we could therefore also expect that most of the responses to the /u/-stimuli will be /y/.

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Not all of the stimuli were completely similar: some had higher frequencies than others. We might therefore expect there to be certain differences in the responses to specific stimuli. The stimulus toot had the highest F2 frequency of all stimuli, and it could therefore be expected that most of the responses to this stimulus is /y/. The stimulus shoon had the highest F1 value of all stimuli; the value, 587 Hz, is much higher than the F1 of Deterding’s (1995) /u/ and Van Leussen et al.’s (2011) /y/ and /u/. This is very far off the average frequency, which makes the vowel in the stimulus even more ambiguous. The stimulus thus resembles Dutch /u/ least of all stimuli, and it could therefore be expected that this stimulus will have the most /y/ responses. When comparing the F2 frequencies of the coronal and the non-coronal stimuli, it is clear that the coronal context affected the production of /u/: all coronal stimuli are produced with higher frequencies than the non-coronal stimuli. It could be expected, therefore, that the coronal stimuli will be matched to /y/ more often than to /u/.

3.1.2 Participants and Experiment Design

The number of participants in this study was 13: 10 of the participants were female and 3 of them were male. As the experiment is merely exploratory, this small number of participants was found to be sufficient. All participants were native speakers of Dutch and reported to have no hearing difficulties. The participants were between 20 and 26 years old, the mean age being 22. As mentioned above, the participants were all (ex-)students of English. Of the participants, 6 were undergraduate (Babet, Cécile, Rojtah, Marit, Mark, and Jopie) and 7 graduate. Three of the participants (Marit, Mark, and Jopie) were in their 1st or 2nd year of the BA, the others were in their 4th or 5th year. Three of the participants (Babet, Cécile and Anna) had lived in England for one year, and one of them (Sabine) had lived in America for one year. These 4 participants have developed different near-native accents: Cécile and Anna both developed an SSB accent, Babet developed a Southern English accent (similar to that of the speaker of this experiment) and Sabine has developed an American accent. The other participants have lived in the Netherlands all their life, and have not developed a near-native accent.

The perceptual experiment was designed using Praat’s (2014) ExperimentMFC. Figure 2 in the appendix presents a screen caption of the experiment. In this experiment, the participants were presented the 40 stimuli in random order, and were not given an orthographic representation of the stimuli to prevent the influence of the lexicon. The stimuli were presented to the participants only once. The participants were given 6 Dutch monosyllabic response words, which can be found in Table 2 below. These words contained

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the vowels /y/, /u/, /i/, /ei/, /ou/ and /ɛi/. The participants were asked to indicate to which of the Dutch words the stimulus they heard corresponded most. The experiment did not include a timer, so that time pressure did not affect the responses. An ‘OK’ and ‘Replay’ button were inserted so that the participants were allowed to choose their response with care. The participants were given a break after having heard 20 stimuli, so that they would not get bored or tired.

Table 2: Dutch Response Stimuli

Dutch Word IPA Translation

Steen /stein/ Rock

Muur /my:r/ Wall

Voet /vu:t/ Foot

Lied /li:t/ Song

Rijk /rɛik/ Rich

Hoog /houx/ High

After the participants finished the experiment, they were asked whether they could guess what the goal of the experiment is and whether they had any difficulties with choosing the responses. This feedback was used to see whether the participants noticed the focus was on the /u/-stimuli, whether they found it hard to match the English and the Dutch vowels and whether they noticed any deficiencies in the experiment design. None of the participants had noticed that the focus of the experiment was on /u/ and what the actual goal of the study was. Most of the participants argued that they could not always find the right answer between the response categories. The third participant of the experiment argued that two of the Dutch words, rook and been, were found confusing since these are words in English as well. These words were changed to hoog ‘high’ and steen ‘stone’, which contain the same vowels in Dutch for the remaining 9 participants. All participants felt that not all stimuli matched perfectly with any of the response categories. During the test, some asked what to do when the correct response word is not there. In this case, they were told to just select the response word which matches best.

The results were measured quantitatively, and in order to explain the findings, assumptions were made that could explain them. First, the results were analysed per stimulus. As the stimuli were divided into a coronal group and a non-coronal group, the effects of these contexts were analysed. If any of the stimuli yielded more or less results than the other, it was researched what could have caused this. Second, the stimuli were analysed per participant. Here, attention was paid to the proficiency of the participants, which here is defined in terms

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of how native-like the accent of the participant is and how long the participant has been a student. If there were any differences between groups of participants, it was analysed what these exact differences are and why these could have yielded different outcomes. The task of the participants was to match English phonemes with Dutch phonemes. An /y/ response suggests that the participant was able to hear the high F2 value of the stimulus and perceive the sound as a front vowel. An /u/ response, on the other hand, suggests that the participant was not able to hear the high F2 value of the stimulus and therefore perceived the sound as a back vowel.

3.2 Results

The results of the study are summarised in Table 3 and Table 4 below. At first sight, there seems to be no consistency between the responses of the participants: there is no clear favour of either /u/ or /y/. Most of the participants were able to match the stimuli with either /u/ or /y/, indicating that they had no difficulties perceiving fronted /u/ as a high rounded vowel. One of the participants, however, matched the /u/-stimuli with different categories half of the time: this participant, Jopie, mapped 5 of the 10 stimuli onto /u/, matched 2 of them with /ei/ and matched 3 of them with /ou/. Her responses were ignored in this analysis because of this. From the 130 responses that were collected, then, only 120 were used in this analysis. Below, the results are analysed in detail.

3.2.1 The Results per Stimulus

Table 3 below presents the total number of /y/ responses per stimulus. In total, 47 stimuli were matched with /y/, which is 39.2% of the total number of relevant stimuli. 70 stimuli were matched with /u/, which comes down to 58.3% of all stimuli, and 3 were matched with neither /u/ nor /y/ (1.7%). The majority of the stimuli were thus matched with /u/, but the majority is not that big: the /y/ responses still form nearly 40% of the responses, which is still a substantial number. When comparing the number of /y/ responses per group of stimuli, it is clear that the fact that stimuli are coronal or not do not result into any differences in responses: the coronal stimuli had 24 of the 47 /y/ responses, and the non-coronal stimuli had 23 /y/ responses. The coronals had higher F2 values than the non-coronal sounds, but since the number of responses of both groups was not different, differences in F2 value did not seems to result in different categorisation in general. When comparing the stimulus with the highest F2 frequency, toot, with the stimulus with the lowest frequency, koom, the responses were not very different: 4 participants matched English /u/ in toot with /y/, and 5 of them matched this

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vowel in koom with /y/. It can be ruled out, then, that differences in F2 values affect perception.

Table 3: Number of /y/ responses per stimulus (not including Jopie’s responses).

Coronal Non-Coronal Toot 4 Gook 2 Foos 5 Fook 4 Soom 4 Moog 8 Shoon 6 Koom 5 Thood 5 Mook 6 Total 24 23

The stimulus which was matched with /y/ most of the times was moog with 8 out of 12 /y/ responses. The /u/ in this stimulus had a similar phonetic context as mook, which was matched with /y/ 6 times. The reason the number of responses to these stimuli are relatively high may be that the two stimuli resembled the response category muur, which may have led the participants to favour /y/ rather than /u/. A lexical effect may thus have influenced the outcomes. There are, however, still some /u/ responses to these two stimuli: 4 of the participants matched /u/ in moog with /u/ and 6 of them matched /u/ in mook with the back vowel. A considerable number of participants, thus, still did not associate the high F2 value with the phonetically closer category /y/ but mapped the vowels onto /u/ instead, despite the lexical effects of muur. The stimulus shoon was matched with /y/ by 6 participants and is the only one, if Jopie’s responses are ignored, which had responses that were neither /u/ nor /y/: the sound was matched with /ei/, /ou/ and /i/. This might be the result of the high F1 value, which is closer to the frequencies of mid vowels than high vowels. The stimulus, then, might have caused some confusion, and therefore resulted in two of the participants matching the sound with a mid-vowel, taking the F1 as a main acoustic cue, and one of the participants matching the sound with /i/, taking the F2 as a main cue.

Overall, it may be argued that the participants did not associate fronted /u/ with either /y/ or /u/. It may be the case, when we look at the responses per stimulus only, that the participants felt that the sound phonetically does not match with either /y/ or /u/, but that it has its own phonetic qualities that do not correspond with the phonetic qualities of the English sound. On the basis of these results, it may be concluded that the 3rd hypothesis, which stated that the participants matched fronted /u/ with both Dutch /y/ and /u/, is confirmed. This might indicate that overall, the participants are unsure of the category with which fronted /u/

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matches most.

3.2.2 The Results per Participant

Table 4 presents all of the responses given per participant. When looking at the responses per participants, it is clear that great variation between the participants exists: the one participant had few /y/ responses, whereas the other had few /u/ responses. As mentioned above, most of the participants felt that the stimuli were hard to categorise: Tugba and Marit argued that there was a sound ‘between /u/ and /o/’ which was hard to categorise, Babet, Rojtah, Mark and Roos argued that they often felt that there was no perfect match between the stimulus and any of the response words, Cécile felt that the muur candidates were hard to categorise (even though she did not match any of the stimuli with /y/) and Lynn argued that a category was missing: she felt that /u/ and /y/ stimuli matched better with the Dutch phoneme /ø/ than with any of the given response categories. Though they all argued that they were unsure about their responses, the participant all showed certain tendencies, and could be placed into four different groups which are described below.

The first group of participants had all spent at least 3 years as a student of the UvA and did not have a near-native accent. They have thus been exposed to a great amount of English input, but did not develop an interlanguage in which the phonetic qualities of the phonemes match the qualities that can be found in any English dialect. The participants in this group – Tugba, Bram, Lynn, Rojtah and Roos – matched most of the stimuli with /u/ and had few /y/ responses. Tugba and Bram both associates shoon with /y/, and Roos associated the sound with the diphthong /ei/. This could have been caused by the high F1 value, as explained above. Bram, Lynn and Rojtah associated moog with /y/ and Rojtah and Roos associated mook with /y/. The resemblance of these stimuli with muur, as explained above, can explain these responses. Lynn, Rojtah and Roos also categorised the stimuli soom, koom and foos and thood (respectively) as /y/, but these responses have no clear explanation. Overall, the participants associated fronted /u/ with the back vowel /u/ most of the time, and therefore seem to perceive the sound in the same way as the participants in Harrington et al. (2008): they associate high F2 frequencies with a phoneme which phonetically used to have low F2 frequencies.

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Table 4: Responses per Person Coronal Contexts

Tugba Bram Babet Cecile Lynn Rojtah Anna

Toot /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/

Foos /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/

Soom /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/

Shoon /y/ /y/ /y/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /ou/

Thood /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/

Total /y/: 1 1 4 0 0 1 0

Marit Roos Ivar Mark Sabine Jopie

Toot /y/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /u/ /u/

Foos /u/ /y/ /y/ /y/ /y/ /u/

Soom /y/ /u/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /ei/

Shoon /y/ /ei/ /y/ /i/ /y/ /ei/

Thood /u/ /y/ /y/ /y/ /y/ /u/

Total /y/: 3 2 4 4 4 0

Non-Coronal Contexts

Tugba Bram Babet Cecile Lynn Rojtah Anna

Gook /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/

Fook /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/

Moog /u/ /y/ /y/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /u/

Koom /u/ /u/ /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/ /u/

Mook /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/ /u/ /y/ /u/

Total /y/: 0 1 2 0 2 2 0

Marit Roos Ivar Mark Sabine Jopie

Gook /u/ /u/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /ou/

Fook /y/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /y/ /u/

Moog /y/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /y/ /ou/

Koom /y/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /u/ /y/

Mook /y/ /y/ /u/ /y/ /y/ /ou/

Total /y/: 4 1 3 5 4 1

The second group of participants is formed by Marit, Mark and Ivar, who matched more stimuli with /y/ than with /u/. Marit and Mark have both spent less than 2 years as a student at the UvA, and have therefore been exposed to less L2 input than the first group of participants. Ivar started the BA in September 2010 and has since been a student, but his accent is clearly influenced by Dutch, suggesting that the extensive exposure to English input has not led to extensive intake. These participants can thus be argued to be less proficient than the former group, and their results can be explained by the fact that their knowledge of Dutch influences their perception of English vowels. Mark associated the vowel in the odd stimulus shoon with

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the vowel /i/, which can be explained by the fact that F2 frequency is too high to be a proper candidate of any of the mid and back vowels, and that he felt that it is not a good candidate of Dutch /y/. No clear explanation can be given to account for the /u/ responses Marit and Ivar have given. The fact that they still associate some of the stimuli with the Dutch category /u/ might suggest that fronted /u/ is situated at the category boundary between the two Dutch phonemes /u/ and /y/. Yet since the majority of the responses are /y/, it can be argued that these participants tend to perceive fronted /u/ as a front vowel rather than a back vowel.

The third group of participants is formed by Anna and Cécile, who have both lived in England for one year and have acquired a near-native SSB accent. Both of them had no /y/ responses; the only non-/u/ response was one of Anna’s, who matched /u/ in shoon with /ou/. This odd response can of course be explained by the high F1 value of the vowel in this stimulus. The two participants thus seem to perceive fronted /u/ in a similar way as the participants in Harrington et al. (2008), namely as a back vowel instead of a front vowel. The responses of the third group may be contrasted to the responses of the fourth group, which is formed by Babet and Sabine, who matched most of the stimuli with /y/. Like Anna and Cécile, these two participants have lived in an English speaking country for at least one year and have developed a native accent. Though the participants in both groups are all near-native speakers, their responses are extremely different. The cause of this difference may be found in their knowledge of the phonetics of English, which differs between the two groups.

As mentioned, Anna and Cécile have a near-native SSB accent. SSB is more conservative than for instance American English (AE) or Estuary English (EE), and has less /u/-fronting than these two other dialects. Phonetically, then, SSB /u/ and AE and EE /u/ differ, as the /u/ of the latter two dialects has a boundary that is much closer to /i/. The responses of Anna and Cécile may then be explained by the fact that they associate high rounded vowels with low F2 values, which correspond with Dutch /u/ rather than with Dutch /y/. It may then also be assumed that Anna’s /ou/-response can be explained by the fact that she associates the rounding of the vowel with back vowels, and since it is too distinct from /u/, she matched the stimulus with /ou/. Unlike the accent of Cécile and Anna, Babet’s accent is close to Estuary English, and that of Sabine is American English. As argued above, these two dialects have more /u/-fronting than SSB. Babet and Sabine, then, may have been more aware of the fact that /u/ can have F2 values which are closer to Dutch /y/ than to Dutch /u/. Their knowledge of the phonetics of the English dialect they have acquired, then, may have led them to perceive more stimuli as /y/ than /u/.

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stimuli toot, foos, thood and fook with /u/, soom and shoon with /ei/, and gook, moog and

mook with /ou/. After having done the test, she mentioned that she thought the nonsense

words were actually Dutch words produced by an English speaker in an English way. The lexicon may therefore have influenced her responses. Lexical influence might explain the /ei/ responses, as the stimuli could be related to the Dutch words zeem ‘shammy’ and scheen ‘shin’, but it does not explain the /ou/ responses since the stimuli do not relate to Dutch words with the diphthong /ou/. Her responses are best explained by stating that she felt that the stimuli and the response categories did not match perfectly, and that her responses are mostly guesses.

3.3 Conclusion

When looking at the results in detail, there still seems to be some variation. A focus on the stimuli was not very informative, though it did explain the number of /y/-responses for moog,

mook and shoon. Differences in context and F2 frequency did not seem to result in any

different responses, so no conclusions have been made purely on the basis of phonetics. A focus on the participants was much more informative, as it seems to be the case that proficiency and acquired accent play a role in the perception of fronted /u/. It seems to be the case that the more proficient the learners are, the more likely they are to ignore their L1 phonetic knowledge in identifying L2 sounds. Proficient learners who acquired an SSB accent seem to behave differently from those who have acquired English accents which are less conservative and have more /u/-fronting.

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4. Discussion

In this thesis, an attempt was made to find out whether Dutch learners of English use their L1 phonological knowledge in perceiving ambiguous L2 sounds or whether this is not the case. The study which was presented in the previous chapter merely tested how Dutch learners matched English phonemes with Dutch counterparts: since they were asked to relate the English vowel to a Dutch vowel, the test did not directly measure how the participants categorised the English vowels initially. The study was therefore unable to see whether the participants used their L1 /y/ category in the perception of English sounds, but only showed whether or not they perceived fronted /u/, however it is categorised initially, as either a front or a back vowel. Three initial hypotheses were made to account for the results that the study might show. At first sight, it seems to be the case that the third hypothesis, which suggested that the responses of the participants contain a great deal of variation, is supported. This third hypothesis is supported by the fact that when looking at the responses per stimulus, there seem to be no clear differences in the number of responses. Most of the stimuli did not have any clear differences between the number of /u/ and /y/ responses they had, which suggests that chance has played an important role in the responding of the participants. If this were truly the case, we might conclude that there seems to be some indications that fronted /u/ is found ambiguous by the participants: if there is no consistency in the responses, participants might have simply guessed between /u/ and /y/. This would in turn suggest that English fronted /u/ is situated at the category boundary between the Dutch categories /y/ and /u/. It turned out, however, that when taking a closer look at the results, this hypothesis does not seem to be supported.

4.1 Loss of the Contrast

When taking a closer look at the results, some other tendencies were found which seem to support the first and second hypotheses that were suggested. In the analysis, the participants were divided into four groups based on proficiency. Linguistic proficiency is a problematic term which encompasses a vast number of factors, and which of course is debatable. In the study, only phonological proficiency was considered, for which the relevant factors were found to be exposure to L2 input and ability to produce L2 phonemes with the correct L2

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phonetic forms. Though this is of course a very limited view of proficiency, these factors were found to be enough, since the goal of the study was to see how the participants perceived the phonetic form of the English category /u/. Familiarity with the phonetics of English phonemes, thus, was thought to be a relevant factor.

It was argued that group 1 matched fronted /u/ with Dutch /u/ most of the times because the participants used their knowledge of English phonology, which does not contain a front rounded vowel. This is in line with hypothesis 1, which supposed that the participants respond with /u/ in most cases. If we assume that the learners have used their knowledge of English phonology, it must be argued that the learners have built up an interlanguage in which the Dutch phoneme /y/ seems to have ‘vanished’: the phonological system of the interlanguage does not contain the front rounded vowel, but only a back rounded vowel. In the test, the participants were asked to match the English phoneme they perceived with one of the Dutch phonemes. The participants in group 1 might then be argued to have mapped the English sound onto the English phoneme /u/ that is stored in their interlanguage and subsequently related /u/ to the Dutch vowel /u/ most of the times. As all of them mapped at least one of the phonemes onto /y/, it could be argued that the native language of the participants does seem to play a slight role in the perception of fronted /u/: in some cases, they are able to perceive the sound as a front rounded vowel.

The second group of participants related fronted /u/ to the Dutch phoneme /y/ in most cases, which contrasts with the responses of group 1. It was argued that this group of participants, who either had spent fewer years at the university as a student of English or whose accent is clearly influenced by Dutch, matched the fronted vowel more with the Dutch phoneme /y/ due to the fact that their knowledge of the phonetic form of the English phonemes is more limited than that of the participants in the former group. If we assume this is to be case, it is argued that when learners learn a new language, they acquire both the phonological categories of that language and the phonetic forms that belong to that language. The perception of English phonemes by less proficient learners is influenced more by the phonetics and phonology of the L1, because assimilation or occurs more (Flege 1981, Best 1995): these learners are likely to associate L2 sounds with the phonemes of their L1 which have specific phonetic forms. It might be argued, then, that if the interlanguage of the participants in group 2 is more influenced by their native language than by their L2, the phoneme /u/ which is stored in their interlanguage has a phonetic representation which is more back than the average English /u/. The perception of fronted /u/ out of a lexical context thus led the participants to associate the sound with a front rounded vowel rather than a back

The Perception of Fronted /u/ by Dutch Learners of English - An Exploratory Study