2017 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Mutual intelligibility among non-native speakers
| Project/Area Number |
17K17734
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| Research Institution | Niigata University |
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Principal Investigator |
ONeal George 新潟大学, 教育・学生支援機構, 准教授 (10554256)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-01 – 2019-03-31
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| Keywords | intelligibility / ELF / pronunciation / segmental / suprasegmental / segmental repair |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The purpose of this research is to discover the segmental and suprasegmental contributions to intelligible English pronunciation among non-native speakers (a Japanese speaker of English and another non-native speaker of English) through observations of segmental repair sequences in naturalistic conversations as well as experimentation. The first year of this research is the data collection stage, and the second year (2018-2019) will be the year in which the analyses of the data sets are conducted. The naturalistic data collection is already complete, but experimental data collection is still ongoing. I have already completed three journal articles based on the naturalistic conversation data. One article has already been accepted（掲載決定）, and will be published in the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation later this year in the fall. The other two articles are still under peer review in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and the Journal of Pragmatics. Articles based on the experiment data are being planned, but because the experiment data collection is still on-going, the articles based on this data have not been completed nor have they been submitted to any journals.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
This project required both naturalistic conversation data and experimental data. The naturalistic data was collected very quickly and relatively easily. The experimental data, however, has taken considerably more time to collect. But experimental data collection is proceeding as planned and should be complete within two months (by the end of July). The experimental data is more difficult to collect because the planned experiment requires that the data be collected from participants who have never met each other before. It has been more difficult than initially thought to recruit participants who have never met each other before.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The naturalistic conversation data has already been subjected to segmental repair analysis and three articles based on this analysis have been submitted to international academic journals. One of the three articles has already been accepted to the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, which is the major journal for my field of study (second language pronunciation). The other two articles are under peer review.
The experimental data set is not yet complete, but once the experimental data collection is finished, I will start to analyze the data. If the statistical analyses are significant, then I think that I can send an article to the the Language Learning journal.
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| Causes of Carryover |
The main reason for the incurring amount to be used next fiscal year is that the observation stage of the project requires a lot of fairly expensive equipment: four cameras, camera stands, a computer that can contain large amounts of data, and backup memory disks to further contain backups of the recordings. The experiment requires that four cameras be used for each session of the experiment, and the experiment requires multiple sessions to complete. Each session usually creates four to eight gigabytes of video recorded data. Accordingly, the experiment will generate close to one thousand gigabytes of data. These thousands of gigabytes have to be back upped on back up disks that can contain terabytes of data. In a word, the experiment requires most of the grant money to set up, and thus the first year costs were more than half of the entire grant.
Luckily, I have procured all the required equipment and the second year of this project does not require the purchase of any more recording or memory equipment. The remaining grant money will be used to analyze the data and present my findings at international conferences.
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