Publication details

First language attrition and maintenance in the accents of native speakers of English living in the Czech Republic

Authors

SUČKOVÁ Magda

Year of publication 2018
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description In my paper I present the results of a foreign accent rating experiment, showing that the Anglophone expatriates‘ speech is perceived as sounding less native-like than that of the control native speakers. Next, I investigate the characteristics of several potentially vulnerable variables – the duration of word-initial plosive VOTs, word-final obstruent (de)voicing, and retention of dental fricatives – in two word-list task datasets obtained from the expatriates and the controls. I conclude that the accents of the expatriates exhibit both signs of first language attrition (manifested as shortening of VOTs) and of language maintenance efforts (manifested as enunciation of word-initial and word-final lenis plosives, and of dental fricatives). I complement the results with extracts from the expatriates‘ personal narratives.
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