Heini Kallio (University of Helsinki)
Assessing and analysing L2 prosody: new tools & methods
Date: 22 November, 2018 11 o'clock
Place: Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1068 Budapest, Benczúr u. 33.)
Abstract
This talk provides an overview of recent and ongoing studies on L2 prosody and fluency assessment and introduces the participants the new CEFR scale for Phonological Control (Council of Europe 2017) as well as a state-of-the-art method for analysing prosody (Suni et al. 2017).
Producing the correct prosody plays a fundamental role in achieving intelligibility and fluency in L2. Intelligibility and fluency, in turn, are central elements in many assessment criteria of oral L2 skills. Prosodic signals, however, are complex, containing information on syllable, word, phrase, and utterance levels. This information is encoded in parallel in one-dimensional signal, which makes prosodic phenomena challenging to study. Continuous wavelet analysis is a step towards a representation for prosody, where the contribution of different phonological layers is distinguishable. This provides new possibilities for analysing prosodic events and illustrate prosodic differences in L1 and L2 speech. I will introduce experiments, where continuous wavelet analysis is applied to L2 speech, and we will discuss its potential use in L2 speech research and assessment.