Acoustic studies comparing Danish vowels, British English vowels, and Danish-accented British English vowels

Abstract

Few studies have examined the production of English vowels by native speakers of languages with vowel inventories as large as, or larger than, English. Danish is such a language, whose vowels are unevenly distributed in the vowel space, with a densely populated upper portion and a sparsely populated lower portion of the vowel space. This paper reports on acoustic comparisons of British English vowels as produced by ten native speakers of British English and of Danish, and of Danish vowels as produced by ten native speakers of Danish. Danish and English vowels were produced in CVC syllables in a variety of consonantal contexts. Acoustic analyses revealed temporal, spectral, and dynamic differences between the vowels produced by the speaker groups. The results of this study suggest that comparisons of vowels across languages, as well as analyses of the productions of non-native speakers, are incomplete and may even be misleading unless the effects of consonantal context are taken into account. The results of this study also provide an interesting test case for Flege’s speech learning model, which makes predictions concerning the learnability of foreign language vowels based on their degree of difference from native language categories.