Non-native (Czech and Russian L1) auditor assessments of some English suprasegmental features: Prominence and pitch accents

Abstract

This study reports on a comparative perceptual experiment investigating the ability of Russian and Czech advanced learners of English to identify prominence in spoken English. Two groups of non-native annotators completed prominence marking tasks on English monologues, both before and after undergoing a 12-week phonological training program. The study employed three annotation techniques: Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT), traditional (British), and ToBI. While the RPT annotations produced by the focus groups did not reach statistical equivalence with those of native English speakers, the data indicate a significant improvement in the perception and categorization of prominence following phonological training. A recurrent difficulty observed in both groups was the accurate identification of prenuclear prominence. This is attributed to prosodic transfer effects from the participants’ first languages, Russian and Czech. The study highlights that systemic, phonetic, and distributional differences in the realization of prominence between L1 and L2 may hinder accurate perceptual judgments in English. It further posits that Russian and Czech speakers rely on different acoustic cues for prominence marking in their native languages, and that these cue-weighting strategies are transferred to English. Nevertheless, the results demonstrate that targeted phonological instruction can substantially enhance L2 learners’ perceptual sensitivity to English prosody.