SLA seminar: Eric Pelzl (Penn State)

Email Tetiana Tytko (ttytko@umd.edu) for the zoom link.

How do listeners respond to frequent pronunciation errors in L2 speech? Insights from research with Mandarin lexical tones

Abstract: Understanding how people respond to typical features of foreign-accented speech can advance theories of speech perception and provide practical guidance for L2 learning. In this presentation, I will provide a framework for classifying features of foreign-accented pronunciation according to how systematic they are, and suggest intuitions about how listeners might respond when pronunciation is more or less systematic. I will then share a series of experiments investigating how L1 Mandarin listeners respond to lexical tone errors in L2 speech. We’ll see that, when pushed to the extreme, listeners will start to ignore tones. Is this a good thing? Could it apply to features other than tones? What does it mean for L2 teaching and learning?

Bio: Eric Pelzl is currently a postdoc at Penn State University. His research seeks to understand what makes some linguistic features difficult to learn in an L2, to determine the practical consequences of those difficulties, and—if possible—to improve learning and teaching of those features.

Suggested readings:
Pelzl, Carlson, Guo, Jackson, and van Hell (2021) Tuning out tone errors? Native listeners do not down-weight tones when hearing unsystematic tone errors in foreign-accented Mandarin. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 24(1), 215 222. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000280

Pelzl, Lau, Jackson, Guo, and Gor (2021) Behavioral and neural responses to tone errors in foreign-accented Mandarin. Language Learning. 71(2), 414-452. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12438