engleski

The Perception of English Prosody in Croatian Speakers of English

This paper deals with Croatian speakers’ ability to differentiate between English native-like and Croglish-like (deviating) prosody in the English language. The focus was on the connected speech features by means of which certain prosodic features, rhythm in particular, are achieved in the English language. This was found to be a weak point in Croatian learners of the English language because of the differences in rhythm between the two languages ; the rhythm of the Croatian language is syllable-based, while the rhythm of the English language is stress-based. The question is whether Croatian learners of English can hear the differences or not. If they can, they need to be taught how to produce what they hear ; if they cannot hear the differences, perception first needs to be facilitated in order for production to occur. Thus, the aim of the research was to establish whether Croatian speakers of English would be able to point out the deviating realizations of the utterances presented in the English language. Two groups of students were involved in the study: students of primary education and English, and primary education students who did not focus on English but attended English for Academic Purposes course. The participants carried out an experiment in which they were presented with strings of speech reflecting certain prosodic and connected speech features used to achieve rhythm. The auditory stimulus comprised a number of utterance pairs. Each pair consisted of a native-like and a nonnative-like utterance (of the same sentence) in the English language. The participants were asked to select the one they perceived as if it were produced by a native speaker. The results of the study show that both groups of users are well able to point out the deviations in the studied aspects of the English prosody, although, as expected, students of English performed better as they had been trained in the phonetics and phonology of the English language and generally had more experience with the English language. The results are interpreted in terms of Reed and Michaud’s (2011) Integrated Model of Pronunciation. The findings of the study will be used to modify the design of the Phonetics and Phonology course which is obligatory for the students of English and the aim of which is to help Croatian L1 students perfect their English pronunciation. The new course design will add a self-monitoring component to the students’ course tasks.

percepcija prozodijskih devijacija, ritam, hrvatski, engleski, Integrirani model izgovora

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