LeaP - Learning the Prosody of a foreign language

The LeaP project, which was funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Research of Northrhine Westphalia from June 2001 to May 2003, was concerned with the acquisition of prosody in a second language. The term prosody refers to the stress rules, the intonation and the speech rhythm of a language. Since all languages differ in their prosodic structure, learners of a foreign language will have to learn a new prosodic structure. The project investigated the structure of L2 prosody, whether learners of a foreign language can learn a language without having a distinct "foreign accent" and how the prosody of an L2 is learned.

The central aim of the project was to provide a detailed decription of non-native prosody using the latest theoretical and methodological approaches.  For this, a large phonologically annotated corpus of L2 speech in both German and English was compiled. It consists of 359 recordings of between 2 and 20 minutes length. It comprises four different speech styles, different speaker groups and two target languages.

Detailed information on the corpus can be found in the corpus manual [pdf]. The annotated corpus is available to the scientific community. Please contact Ulrike Gut at the University of Augsburg.

Publications

Gut, U. (2009): Non-native speech. A corpus-based analysis of phonological and phonetic properties of L2 English and German. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Gut, U. (2009). Cross-linguistic influence in L3 phonological acquisition. International Journal of Multilingualism.

Gut, U. (2008): Phonology in advanced learners of English. In: M. Walter & P. Grommes (eds),     Fortgeschrittene Lernervarietäten. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 189-207.

Gut, U. (2007): Sprachkorpora im Phonetikunterricht. Zeitschrift für interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 12(2).Gut, U. (2007): Foreign accent. In: C. Müller (ed.), Speaker classification. Berlin: Springer, pp. 75-87.

Gut, U. (2007): Learner corpora in second language research and teaching. In J. Trouvain, U. Gut (eds.): Non-native prosody: phonetic description and teaching practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 145-167.

Gut, U. (2006): Learner speech corpora in language teaching. In S. Braun, K. Kohn and J. Mukherjee (eds.), Corpus Technology and Language Pedagogy: New Resources, New Tools, New Methods, Frankfurt: Lang, pp. 69-86.

Carson-Berndsen, J., Gut, U. & Kelly, R. (2006): Discovering Regularities in Non-native Speech. In: A. Wilson, P. Rayson and D. Archer (eds.), Corpus Linguistics Around the World, Rudopi, pp. 77-89.