Acoustic and perceptual similarities between Effutu and English fricatives: Implications for English as a second language

Volin & Skarnitzl (2010) describe a foreign accent as a set of pronunciation patterns, at both segmental and suprasegmental levels, which differ from pronunciation patterns found in the speech of native speakers (p.1010). Not only can these pronunciation patterns differ, they can also be similar in many ways. These similarities can be perceptual, acoustic and auditory, especially at the segmental level. This study investigates the acoustic and perceptual similarities between the fricatives /s/, /f/ and /∫/ of Effutu, a dialect of Awutu, and their English counterparts in the context of /a/ and /i/. Duration and spectral peak frequency are measured in order to achieve this. A discrimination task, Same-Different task, was administered to investigate listeners’ perceived similarity (or difference) judgments between the pairs of fricatives. Preliminary findings show that there are perceptual and acoustic differences in the durations of these segments cross-linguistically. This study contributes to cross-linguistic investigation of fricatives, and to second language acquisition. The findings also show that the use of acoustic and perceptual cues helps to establish differences between speech sounds in different languages, and that, ESL teachers can use these to develop appropriate ways of teaching English sounds to learners.