The paper focuses on the ability of Czech speakers to explicitly imitate native English realizations of the phoneme /t/ as [ʔ] (t-glottaling). In Czech, glottalization occurs as a boundary signal of wordinitial vocalic onsets. We hypothesize that this allows for a better imitative performance in the intervocalic context as compared to non-prevocalic contexts. However, an alternative hypothesis based on language-external facts (frequency in the learners’ English input) predicts the opposite pattern. Our experiment involves 30 participants in a shadowing task. In addition to words with /t/, words with /k/ are examined to establish if speakers can generalize to a phonologically similar category to which they have not been exposed. Speakers adapted their pronunciation after exposure to t-glottaling to some degree. Our hypothesis was confirmed for the shadowing task, while the alternative language-external hypothesis was confirmed for the post-test task, suggesting a different pattern of performance in terms of imitation versus learning.
Glottal stops placed before words starting with a vowel are an integral part of the sound patterns of Czech; however, in Romance languages glottal stops are quite rare and linking to the previous word is much more common. In this study, we examine the extent to which more and less experienced Czech learners of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (51 in total) use glottal stops or linking in their target language, and compare them with native speakers (29 in total). Analyses of word- and also morpheme-initial contexts reveal that the glottal stop is transferred into the learners’ target language word initially but almost never within words. In line with our hypotheses, the more experienced groups are found to use fewer glottal stops than the less experienced speakers, but still considerably more than the native control groups. We also consider the effect of lexical stress, segmental context and semantic status of the respective words on glottalization. Methodological implications for the teaching of Romance languages in the Czech context are also discussed.
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