The Perception of Vowels and Phonological Processes of English by Poles Demonstrating Limited Knowledge of English as Evidenced by Amateur Phonetic Transcription

Abstract

This paper aims to examine if an amateur phonetic transcription can serve as a provider of information for a specialist in phonetics and phonology. Two phonetic transcriptions of songs and a phonetic prompt prepared for speakers at one of the railway stations in Poland were studied. For obvious reasons, for people who do not have knowledge of phonetics and phonology, the only way to register speech in writing is to use letters of the Polish alphabet. This method of transcription finds its justification in the literature on the subject, where the concept of semi-phonetic transcription is proposed by Polish linguists. In terms of the perception of vowels by Poles, the transcriptions under analysis uncovered some new solutions related to the pronunciation of [ə], [æ], [ʌ] and [u:] by Poles. The graphic representation of the closing diphthongs confirmed that they are invariably perceived as a vowel + off-glide sequence also by the musically gifted and/or educated transcribers. As to the relationship between musical skills and linguistic performance, which is also in the focus of this paper, the most significant observation concerns the transcriptions of songs in which the musically skilled and/or educated transcribers heard chunks of speech rather than single words. Other phonological processes operating in connected speech remained unnoticed by them, but some new light was shed on the perception of syllabicity which was graphically notated as full vowels [e] and [y] apart from [o] and [ə] featuring in the subject literature

Keywords

• phonetic transcription
• semi-phonetic transcription
• phonology
• phonetics
• music-phonology relationship