The effects of the acoustic properties of second language vowel production on pronunciation evaluation
Chris Sheppard · ExLing Conferences · 2008
This study examines the acoustic characteristics which native speakers use as cues when judging speech samples. Seventeen words produced by 98 speakers (15 native speakers and 83 Japanese learners of English) were collected and evaluated. Following this, the first three formants for each vowel produced were measured and used as independent variables in stepwise multiple regression analyses to explain variance in the evaluations. The results demonstrated that the formants did explain variance in evaluation in many but not all of the words ($r^2$ = 0.0 to 0.36).