Helping teachers help students with pronunciation
This article introduces a theoretical framework for understanding speechand pronunciation based on insights from cognitive phonology in whichpronunciation is seen as a cognitive skill. In learning a cognitive skill, practice isessential, but its value depends on students having the right concept of what itis they are practising. Helping students form concepts appropriate to the newlanguage is therefore a crucial part of a language teacher's role. The article startswith an informal overview of the role of concepts and concept formation incognition. I then consider how well-known observations about pronunciationand pronunciation learning can be understood from this perspective, andsuggest some principles which can account for and extend these observations.Finally, I compare the cognitive approach with more familiar mainstream viewsof phonology, and suggest that they are not in conflict but offer significantlyand usefully different perspectives appropriate to different applications.
The sbelling of sdops: Preliterate children's spelling of stops after /s/
Newly literate children have a tendency to spell s-stop sequences in words like "spin", "stop", "sky" with B, D, G (SBIN, SDOP, SGY), rather than with standard P, T, K. This observation potentially has implications for theories of English phonology as well as of language and literacy acquisition. Understanding these implications, however, requires data about the spelling preferences of preliterate children. In this study, a training-and-transfer design was used to test these spelling preferences in preliterate children. Results confirm that these children relate words with stops after /s/ to words with initial /b, d, g/ rather than to words with initial /p, t, k/. The paper outlines several possible interpretations: that preliterate children have a different phonemic analysis from adults, that they believe spelling represents archiphonemes, that they believe spelling represents allophones, and that their early spelling attempts track the phonetic surface. The data suggest rejection of the second interpretation and in our view favour the last over the remaining interpretations. Several theoretical issues are raised that need to be resolved before a full account of the data can be offered.
Phonological Concepts and Concept Formation: Metatheory, Theory and Application
This paper presents an overview of Phenomenological Phonology (PP),including its metatheory, theory and application, for comparison with Cognitive Phonology (CP). While PP and CP are in close agreement at the theory level, there are some significant differences at the level of metatheory. PP considers phonological terms (such as 'phoneme' and 'word' to be words like any others, and gives detailed consideration to the concepts behind such terms. It also considers pronunciation to be a form of behaviour, driven by concepts created through general concept-formation processes. This has important consequences for practical application in the areas of pronunciation and literacy teaching.
Cognitive Phonology as a tool for teaching second language pronunciation
This paper starts by recognising that, in general, pronunciation is the least successfully taught of the second language skills, and suggesting this indicates a need for a better theoretical framework within which teachers can understand and facilitate learners' acquisition of L2 pronunciation. Structural-generative theory, which has been dominant in phonology for some time, has limited application in this domain. However, applying the principles of Cognitive Phonology may lead to improved results. It then reviews the basic Cognitive Phonology principle: 'the signifier is a concept', and explains how the literacy bias (the tendency of those literate in the alphabetic script to believe that speech is a string of discrete phonemes) makes this principle more difficult to grasp than the very similar but far more widely understood principle that the signified is a concept. Discussion continues to consider implications of this idea for language teachers: phonemes, and other units of phonology, are not real things but abstract concepts. Teaching pronunciation thus involves facilitating concept formation. The paper then moves to consider some implications for theory of the observation that the concept of phoneme is derived from prior understanding of words and other larger units of phonology. It concludes by suggesting there may be productive parallels between the arguments presented here regarding the relationship between words and phonemes, and arguments advanced by Construction Grammar in regard to the relationship between lexis and grammar, whose implications for second language teaching are explored by other papers in this volume.
The power and persistence of contextual priming: more risks in using police transcripts to aid jurors' perception of poor quality covert recordings
A poor quality covert recording from an Australian murder case, along with the police transcript used in the trial but later shown to be inaccurate, are used to explore general issues regarding this increasingly common type of evidence. Two experiments were run, in which participants heard an excerpt from the audio, first with no transcript, then with suggested and alternative transcripts. In Experiment 1, they were given no contextual information, while Experiment 2 started with a background story about the case and the issue the recording was intended to resolve. Results indicate that background knowledge of a case can dramatically increase listeners' acceptance of a police transcript, even when the transcript is manifestly inaccurate. It is suggested that such contextual priming may affect not just juries but others involved with the trial, and recommended that police transcripts be treated with more caution than is currently common with Australia's 'ad hoc expert' rules.
Teaching and Learning L2 Pronunciation: Understanding the Effectiveness of Socially Constructed Metalanguage and Critical Listening in Terms of a Cognitive Phonology Framework
This thesis investigates the processes learners go through in learning the pronunciation of a second language, and how teachers can facilitate these processes. Its focus on the cognitive has led to the development of general teaching principles and the development of theory. It brings theory and practice together by using practice to inform theory and theory to re-inform practice. A broad multi-disciplinary approach has been taken, drawing on insights from phonology and L2 speech research, pronunciation pedagogy, and theoretical insights from SLA (Second Language Acquisition), socio-cultural theory and educational psychology, and bringing these together under a unifying theory of Cognitive Phonology. The empirical evidence to support both the theoretical and practical conclusions reached is provided through a progressive series of qualitative and quantitative studies. These studies all focus on difficulties in pronouncing syllable codas, i.e. epenthesis (the addition of a vowel) and absence (inappropriate omission of a consonant), in the context of adult high-intermediate level ESOL students resident in New Zealand. ... This thesis finds there is a role for form-focused instruction and corrective feedback in pronunciation learning. While this is in line with many views within SLA theory, it is only by turning to Cognitive Phonology that the necessary distinctions can be drawn between types of instruction in order to reveal what it is that makes explicit instruction effective. These theoretical insights are shown to have practical applications for the classroom.