First language attrition and maintenance in the accents of native speakers of English living in the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| 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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