Voice onset time in English voiceless initial stops in read and spontaneous speech of Thai students with English as a second language

Many studies (Lisker & Abramson 1964, Lisker and Abramson 1967, Kessinger & Blumstein 1997, Yao 200, Smith et al 2015) have shown that values of voice onset time (VOT), the interval between the burst of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, in initial stops differ among languages and are sensitive to various factors. Though both fall under the long-lag category of VOT, Thai voiceless aspirated stops have longer VOT on average than English voiceless stops (Lisker & Abramson, 1964) and Thai ESL speakers tend to produce English voiceless stops with VOT values close to those of Thai aspirated stops, affirming the effect of L1 on L2 (Shimizu, 2011). Among understudied factors that could affect VOT values is speech time. Previous studies on the correlation between time and VOT in initial stops (Grosjean & Miller 1994, Balukas & Koops 2015, Piccinini & Arvaniti 2015) have concerned spontaneous code-switching so as to examine code-switching as a factor triggering linguistic convergence in dyadic speech, lasting up to 30 seconds. This paper examines VOT values in English initial stops produced by Thai speakers to investigate whether VOT values would vary as speech time elapses without code-switching. The experiment also includes both read speech and spontaneous speech so as to determine whether the variation is consistent across speech styles.

 

Six university students with a high level of English proficiency whose native language is Thai were selected to perform two tasks. Each subject was asked to give a 7-minute English monologue to obtain long spontaneous speech in the first task and read a selected long English passage to obtain approximately equally long read speech in the second task. VOT was then segmented manually and stops without a clear point of burst were then excluded from the research, resulting in 890 tokens, 367 tokens from spontaneous speech and 523 tokens from read speech. The result reveals that raw VOT in spontaneous speech is significantly shorter than in read speech and no trend regarding VOT and time is found either between speech styles or among places of articulation. The mix-effects model was then used to systemically control the effects of speech rate, place of articulation, following vowel height, lexical items, and speakers. Adjusted VOT values show that VOT values tend to remain constant throughout seven minutes in both speech styles. These findings are consistent with those introduced by Balukas & Koops (2015), whose results illustrate that changes in VOT values level off after a particular point in speech. 

I then suggest that the proximity of VOT values in this paper to those in Shimizu’s study (2011) affirms the effect of L1 on L2 in terms of VOT and that such effect does not amplify over speech time. The marked difference between VOT values in spontaneous and read speech is also in line with previous findings (Baran et al 1977, Chodroff & Wilson 2017) and supports stylistic variation, that is, awareness of speech affects the articulation of stops.

 

Flash fiction is a genre of short stories, which has become increasingly popular in the USA and other countries. Flash fiction stories are characterized by brevity and contain 500-1000 words. By now three collections of stories of 1992, 2006, and 2015 have been published, among the authors are such famous writers as John Updike, Grace Paley, Don Shea. These stories are distinguished by expressiveness, emotional character, imagery and the realization of foregrounding. The theory of foregrounding is one of the foundations of stylistics. The theory owes much to the Russian formalists and the Prague School of Linguistics. Linguistic aspects of foregrounding are formulated by M.Short, G.Leech, I.V.Arnold. In recent years, foregrounding and its realization have been investigated in the works of such researchers as J.Douthwaite (2000), O.V.Yemets (2019), and others. However, there are only few works on foregrounding in the flash fiction stories. 

 

The aim of this paper is to determine the main types and functions of stylistic convergence, which is the manifestation of quantitative aspect of foregrounding in flash fiction stories. 

 

Foregrounding is the principle of a literary text organization, which focuses the reader’s attention on the pragmatically important elements of the message (Arnold 2004). G. Leech singles out qualitative and quantitative aspects of foregrounding (Leech, Short 2007). The quantitative aspect can be realized by the stylistic convergence. In flash fiction stories, it occupies mostly one or two paragraphs. Nevertheless, it gives the texts emotional character and expressiveness. 

 

In the story “Justice – a Beginning” G.Paley describes the appearance of the mother of a man who has just been sentenced: She leaned on the witness bar, her face like a dying flower in its late-season, lank leafage of yellow hair, turning one way then the other in the breeze and blast of justice. Like a sunflower maybe in mid-autumn, having given up on the sun, Faith thought (Flash Fiction Forward 2006). Due to the metaphoric similes and alliteration of the sound [l] the stylistic convergence emphasizes the feelings of pity to the woman. 

 

Another type of stylistic convergence is realized in the story “Oliver’s Evolution” by J.Updike describing how a weak boy becomes a strong man: You should see him now, with their two children, a fair little girl and a dark-haired boy. Oliver has grown broad, and holds the two of them at once. They are birds in a nest. He is a tree, a sheltering boulder. He is a protector of the weak (Flash Fiction Forward 2006). This convergence includes extended metaphors and parallel structures, which foreground the idea of spiritual strength. 

 

All in all I analyzed 30 flash fiction stories, stylistic convergence is present mainly in such strong position as the end of the text. It makes these fragments more foregrounded, produces a strong emotional and aesthetic effect. Stylistic convergences are used to describe the beauty of nature (R.Carney), express such emotions as pleasure and feeling of love (L.Wilson) and the idea of cultural tolerance (D.Galef) and tolerant attitude towards people in tragic situations (D.Eggers).

This individual article from the Proceedings is published here.