Date of Award

Spring 2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Languages and Cultures

First Advisor

Daniel Olson

Committee Member 1

Jessica Sturm

Committee Member 2

Colleen Neary-Sundquist

Committee Member 3

Elena Benedicto

Abstract

Research suggests that pronunciation instruction should be developed and taught in the second language classroom (Derwing & Munro, 2005; Elliott, 1997; Simões, 1996) in order to facilitate intelligible and comprehensible utterances in the L2 (Derwing & Munro, 1997). Although accentedness does not always create intelligibility issues, it can be the catalyst to negative native speaker perceptions of second language learners' speech (Derwing & Munro, 2009). One distinctive marker of accent among native speakers of English and Spanish is the duration of aspiration values for the voiceless plosives /p/ /t/ /k/ (Lord, 2005). The present study proposes the use of visual feedback treatments to aid native speakers of American English in producing more target-like realizations of /p/ /t/ /k/ in Spanish. Generalizability between treatments was also measured in order to observe whether or not second language learners can apply their knowledge to non-focus phonemes, as well as from words in a carrier phrase to various, longer types of speech. Results conclude that the Experimental group improved significantly in each elicitation task from the Pre-test to the Post-test. Responses to an attitudes survey also determine that participants favor a combination of explicit instruction and visual feedback. This study concludes that learners are able to generalize pronunciation knowledge of tokens in a carrier phrase to longer discourse, as well as from focus to non-focus phonemes.

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