THE PHONETIC REALIZATIONS OF THE SHORT FALLING ACCENT PRODUCED BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH: A PRELIMINARY STUDY
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Abstract
The acoustic characteristics of the accentual system of Serbian produced by native speakers have been investigated in previous studies. However, the realizations of Serbian accents by non-native speakers have not received much attention. The aim of this paper is to analyze the short falling accent productions of three native speakers of English and compare them to the productions of native speakersof Serbian, analyzed in previous studies. The corpus consists of 118 disyllabic words in phrase-medial position. The words were taken from three television interviews. We measured f0 values at the beginning and end of the stressed and unstressed vowels, as well as the highest and lowest f0 values of these vowels. In addition, we measured the mean intensity of the vowels, as well as their duration. Results show that the pitch movement which most frequently occurs in the stressed vowel in the production of native speakers of English can also be found in the production of native speakers of Serbian, but there are certain differences between their realizations. The maximum f0 of the stressed vowel in our corpus tends to be higher than the maximum f0 of the unstressed vowel, but these falling intervals are not as large as those produced by native speakers.. As regards the interval between the initial syllable vowel end and the final syllable vowel beginning, native speakers of English produce a rising pitch movement, while native speakers of Serbian produce a falling pitch movement. The intensity and duration values of the vowels produced by native speakers of English are more similar to those produced by native speakers of Serbian. We believe that these two variables are generally easier to master than f0; in addition, stressed and unstressed vowels in English show the same tendency with respect to intensity and duration as Serbian vowels.
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