Phonetic imitation of t-glottaling by Czech speakers of English

Abstract

The paper focuses on the ability of Czech speakers to explicitly imitate native English realizations of the phoneme /t/ as [ ʔ ] (t-glottaling). In Czech, glottalization occurs as a boundary signal of word-initial vocalic onsets. We hypothesize that this allows for a better imitative performance in the intervocalic context as compared to non-prevocalic contexts. However, an alternative hypothesis based on language-external facts (frequency in the learners’ English input) predicts the opposite pattern. Our experiment involves 30 participants in a shadowing task. In addition to words with /t/, words with /k/ are examined to establish if speakers can generalize to a phonologically similar category to which they have not been exposed. Speakers adapted their pronunciation after exposure to t-glot-taling to some degree. Our hypothesis was confirmed for the shadowing task, while the alternative language-external hypothesis was confirmed for the post-test task, suggesting a different pattern of performance in terms of imitation versus learning.