Non-natives’ production of vowels in conversational speech

The aim of this study was to determine if native speakers of Italian can ever learn to produce accurately English vowels not found in Italian. A recent study [J. E. Flege, I. R. A. MacKay, and D. Meador, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., under review], in which native Italian subjects were asked to repeat real words presented via a loudspeaker, showed that early but not late bilinguals produced English /ɪʊɚ/ accurately. None of the subjects, however, did so when asked to repeat nonwords. But what about the most crucial evidence—conversational speech? Here a new technique with satisfactory experimental control ws developed to assess vowels produced in conversational speech. Speech samples were obtained from the same 90 subjects who participated in the earlier study. The subjects’ production of /ɪʊɚ/ (not found in Italian) and /i æ o/ was evaluated auditorily by native English-speaking listeners. Preliminary results indicate that early bilinguals can learn to produce /ɪʊɚ/ accurately in conversational speech, but that only a declining proportion of subjects do so as the age of learning English increases. High scores for /o/, which is much like an Italian vowel, were obtained. This suggested that listeners are not unduly influenced by overall degree of foreign accent in the samples examined.