VOT of English Plosives Produced by Polish Learners of English

Abstract

This paper attempts to contribute to the description of the characteristics of the acoustics of English spoken by Polish people by focussing on the VOT of plosives produced by speakers representing three different age groups, i.e. primary school students, high school students and university students. While there have been numerous studies on the acoustics of English spoken by Polish people, there seem to be few studies that compare the speech of speakers representing different age groups and/or levels – filling this gap in knowledge is the main research goal of this study. The data collected in this experiment is compared to reference values for English and Polish plosives which allows to check whether the participants are closer to the VOT values of native English realisations or those of the corresponding plosives in Polish. The study reveals that (i) /p, t, k/ are realised with long-lag VOT and their mean values are close to the ones of native English being, at the same time, higher than the ones reported for /p, t, k/ in Polish and (ii) /b, d, g/ are realised with negative VOT characteristic of prevoicing rendering them considerably different from the ones in native English and similar to their equivalents in Polish. Moreover, the differences between the three age groups are relatively small. The university students seem to be the ones with realisations closest to the native ones as they exhibit the highest VOT results of /p, t, k/, yet they still produce long periods of prevoicing in /b, d, g/. The results of the study suggest that more emphasis should be put on pronunciation practice of /b, d, g/ as it seems to be the more difficult group of English plosives for the Polish speakers.