The esês of nasal gliding in Polish students of English

 

Joanna Przedlacka* and Sylwia Scheuer^

* University of Warsaw and ^Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznañ

 

The project focuses on the Polish phonostylistic process called Nasal Gliding and the articulation of alveolar/dental stops. The purpose of this pilot study was to (a) obtain some new data on the phonetic realization of ‘nasal + obstruent’ sequences in Polish, and (b) test the influence of L2 (English) training on the L1 phonetic habits of the subjects.

 

Thirteen subjects participated in this real time study. All of them were first year students at the School of English, UAM, and were recorded at the beginning of their course in October 2003. In order to test the behaviour of the two dependent phonetic variables, data from two elicitation tasks were collected. The informants were recorded using two different speech styles: first they read a passage and then a word list in Polish. The English task which followed was constructed in the same way. This bilingual task will be replicated at the beginning of May 2004 after the students have completed their segmental phonetics training.

 

About 6-7 minutes of speech material was collected from each informant in October. The data on its own does not suffice for a more conclusive statement, yet certain interesting tendencies in the Polish tasks can already be discovered, such as the relatively high degree - in comparison to the treatment this variable receives in traditional accounts of Polish phonetics - of nasal gliding even in the context of a following plosive consonant.

 

A complete analysis of the findings, particularly with reference to point (b) above - i.e. the extent to which the subjects' improvement in L2 phonetic performance on the selected variables affects their L1 pronunciation - will be presented in the full version of the paper in May.

 

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