Phonetic aspects of strongly-accented Czech speakers of English

Abstract

This paper contributes to the study of Czech-accented English by examining multiple pronunciation features, both segmental and prosodic, typically associated with or previously studied in Czech English. We analyzed ten female speakers who had been evaluated as having a strong accent in their English, using auditory and acoustic approaches. In the segmental domain, most of the analyzed speakers used Czech equivalents of the English open vowels /a ɒ/ and tended to pronounce a velar plosive after a velar nasal. In the domain of connected speech, linking was very rare in our speakers, and their pitch range tended to be very flat. The results underscore the fact that the label “strong Czech accent” may, in different speakers, refer to different constellations of pronunciation features.

Keywords

• foreign accent
• pronunciation
• second language acquisition
• L1 transfer
• Czech English