Abstract
My previous studies on Japanese speakers’ pronunciation of English were based on recordings of TIMIT—a phonetic corpus that consists of isolated sentences with words chosen for the sake of phonological balance. The scope of possible analyses with TIMIT is limited because the recorded utterances are prosodically monotonous and the pronunciation of difficult words is unstable. To conduct more reliable speech assessments via read-alouds, I embarked on a critical analysis of diagnostic passages. This chapter critically reviews eight different diagnostic passages that have been used for data collection mainly in terms of phonetic coverage. My goal was to find one that meets the following criteria: contains every English phoneme; includes as many diphones as possible, especially those found to be difficult for Japanese speakers; does not contain words that are infrequent or too difficult for learners; constitutes a coherent passage which can elicit different prosodic patterns according to context; and illustrates a variety of speech acts that can elicit different intonation choices. Based on the critical review, the chapter argues for the selection of one diagnostic passage as the most suitable (after a few suggested adaptations) to collect English speech data from Japanese learners of English.
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Notes
- 1.
Vowel-to-consonant combinations are not considered because they are not candidates for connected speech phenomena, such as linking and assimilation, and therefore do not generally pose pronunciation problems for language learners.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this study was supported by KAKEN Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 18K00663 and (A) 18H04107 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Chuo University Grant for Special Research.
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Appendix
Appendix
Labov’s “text for phonemic contrasts” (Labov, 2006), with adapted part underlined.
Last Saturday night I took Mary Parker to the Paramount Theatre. I wanted to go and see The Jazz Singer, but Mary got her finger in the pie. She hates jazz, because she can’t carry a tune, and besides, she never misses a new film with Cary Grant. Well, we were waiting in line about half an hour, when some farmer from Kansas or somewhere asked us how to get to Palisades Amusement Park.
Naturally, I told him to take a bus at the Port Authority Garage on 8th Avenue, but Mary right away said no, he should take the I.R.T. to 125th Street, and go down the escalator. She actually thought the ferry was still running.
“You’re certainly in the dark,” I told her. “They tore down that dock ten years ago, when you were in diapers.”
“And what’s the source of your information, Roger?” She used her sweet-and-sour tone of voice, like ketchup mixed with tomato sauce. “Are they running submarines to the Jersey shore?”
When Mary starts to sound humorous, that’s bad: merry hell is sure to break loose. I remembered the verse from the Bible about a good woman being worth more than rubies, and I bared my teeth in some kind of a smile. “Don’t tell this man any fairy tales about a ferry. He can’t go that way.”
“Oh yes he can!” she said. Just then a little old lady, as thin as my grandmother, came up shaking a tin can, and this farmer asked her the same question. She suggested that he ask a subway guard. My god! I thought, that’s one sure way to get lost in New York City.
Well, I managed to sleep through the worst part of the picture, and the stage show wasn’t too hard to bear, which was a pleasure for me. Then I wanted to go and have a bottle of beer, but she had to have a chocolate milk at Chock Full O’ Nuts. Chalk this up as a total loss, I told myself. I bet that farmer is still wandering around looking for the 125th Street Ferry.
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Makino, T. (2022). Speech Assessment via Read-Alouds: A Critical Analysis of Diagnostic Passages. In: Sardegna, V.G., Jarosz, A. (eds) Theoretical and Practical Developments in English Speech Assessment, Research, and Training. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98218-8_6
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