ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024
ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024

Duration and Declination in L2 Reading

Bojia Wang, Dafydd Gibbon

This study is motivated by requirements to deal with L2 prosody evaluation, as stated, for instance in the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR), and by the importance of prosody in expressing emotion, emphasis, contrast and structure, one functional component of prosody which receives little attention in the literature was picked out for attention: the global property of holistic slope variability (e.g. declination or inclination). Statistical and machine learning methods were used in the context of a novel modulation theoretic ‘Radio Model’ of speech to identify differences in slope properties as a model for global declination-like trends. The different methods were used in order to gain different views of the data, with Southern British English as Ltarget and as L2 for Mandarin Chinese speakers. The null hypothesis that there are no Ltarget-L2 differences was refuted by each of these methods. The results show that the automatic analysis of global F0 trends is potentially viable as support for learner self-instruction and for learner evaluation.