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Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners’ perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence for phonetic adjustments that native English speakers make to influence listeners, the current study explored the use of consonant prolongation in stressed syllable onsets for emphasis by native British English speakers and English L2 learners. The native speakers’ durations of continuant consonants and voiceless stop consonant voice onset times (VOTs) in (1) neutrally-produced speech and (2) persuasively delivered motivational/shocking/emotional messages were compared to Latvian L2 English speakers’ productions. The results revealed that in persuasive speech, the British speakers’ consonantal durations, particularly those of continuants, got significantly longer relative to the vowels that followed them; for English L2 learners, the duration of consonants did not change as a factor of speech type. This is in line with our previous research with American English speakers and carries implications for L2 speech learning and teaching.

The present study explored how persuasiveness is expressed phonetically in English and whether non-native speakers of English are able to employ L2 phonetic cues to convey importance in L2 in a native-like manner. An acoustic experiment compared English and Latvian speakers’ of English treatment of syllable-onset consonant duration relative to vowels in (i) neutral and (ii) persuasive speech contexts. Duration was measured in voiceless stops and continuants and a wide variety of vowels in the stressed syllables of key words. Results revealed that in persuasive speech, native English speakers significantly increased the proportion of consonantal duration, whereas no consonant lengthening was found in Latvian L1 and L2 productions. These findings provide evidence for the paralinguistic function of consonants and the existence of language-specific persuasion cues. Este estudio ha analizado como la persuasion se expresa foneticamente en ingles, y si los hablantes de ingles no nativos son capaces de transmitir importancia utilizando indicadores foneticos de la lengua extranjera de manera equivalente a los nativos ingleses. Un experimento acustico comparo la duracion de las consonantes que van al inicio de silabas en relacion con las vocales pronunciadas por hablantes nativos de ingles y hablantes nativos de leton que hablan ingles en el contexto del discurso neutral (i) y persuasivo (ii). Se midieron la duracion de las consonantes sordas oclusivas y de las continuas, asi como la duracion de las vocales de toda clase en las silabas acentuadas en palabras clave. Los resultados obtenidos revelaron que, en el discurso de persuasion, los hablantes nativos de ingles aumentan notablemente la duracion de las consonantes, mientras que los hablantes de leton no la aumentan ni en leton ni en ingles. Estos hallazgos demuestran la funcion paralinguistica de las consonantes y la existencia de indicadores de la persuasion propios de que cada idioma.

Recent findings [Dilley and Pitt, 2010. Psych. Science. 21, 1664-1670] have shown that manipulating context speech rate in English can cause entire syllables to disappear or appear perceptually. The current studies tested two rate-based explanations of this phenomenon while attempting to replicate and extend these findings to another language, Russian. In Experiment 1, native Russian speakers listened to Russian sentences which had been subjected to rate manipulations and performed a lexical report task. Experiment 2 investigated speech rate effects in cross-language speech perception; non-native speakers of Russian of both high and low proficiency were tested on the same Russian sentences as in Experiment 1. They decided between two lexical interpretations of a critical portion of the sentence, where one choice contained more phonological material than the other (e.g., /stərʌ'na/ “side” vs. /strʌ'na/ “country”). In both experiments, with native and non-native speakers of Russian, context speech rate and the relative duration of the critical sentence portion were found to influence the amount of phonological material perceived. The results support the generalized rate normalization hypothesis, according to which the content perceived in a spectrally ambiguous stretch of speech depends on the duration of that content relative to the surrounding speech, while showing that the findings of Dilley and Pitt (2010) extend to a variety of morphosyntactic contexts and a new language, Russian. Findings indicate that relative timing cues across an utterance can be critical to accurate lexical perception by both native and non-native speakers.