Papers by Arkadiusz Rojczyk
Chapter 4. Perception of the English Voice Onset Time Continuum by Polish Learners
TheAcquisition of L2 Phonology, 2011
Moderna Språk, 2024
The aim of the article is to present the research results on two important character virtues, nam... more The aim of the article is to present the research results on two important character virtues, namely creativity and curiosity. Creativity is very significant in the teaching profession, as it involves researching, looking for solutions, and making choices. Curiosity involves "the active recognition, pursuit, and regulation of one's experience in response to challenging opportunities" (Peterson & Seligman, 2004: 125). The research was conducted in Poland among 149 Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers for whom these features are indispensable, bearing in mind various obstacles they have to face, e.g., lack of proper teaching materials. In order to collect the data, the VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) was disseminated among Primary, Junior High School and Secondary School teachers. In the following article, only the data concerning creativity and curiosity is discussed. The findings indicate that self-reported scores for the statements connected with CLIL teachers' creativity and curiosity did not correlate significantly with the teachers' experience in CLIL and none of the tested aspects significantly depended on the educational level of the teachers' employing institutions.
Psychology of Language and Communication, 2024
Phonetic imitation, understood as adjustment of one's pronunciation towards that of a model speak... more Phonetic imitation, understood as adjustment of one's pronunciation towards that of a model speaker, plays an important role in second language speech learning. The current study was intended to determine the degree to which young native Polish learners of English imitate native English models' speech, with gender as a potential influencing factor. Thirty-four participants shadowed words with both voiceless /p, t, k/ and voiced /b, d, g/ consonants as onsets, which differ in terms of voice onset time (VOT) in the two languages. Having compared VOT measurements in three tasks, no significant differences were found for /p, t, k/, suggesting no imitation effect regardless of gender, and an apparent increase of prevoicing for /b, d, g/ in the imitation tasks. Some of the null results may be attributed to high baseline values and to the stimuli's conflicting modalities. Noticeable variability in the data may have masked the true impact of imitative exposure.
Exploiter pédagogiquement l’imitation de l’accent d’une langue étrangère
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 1, 2021
Using foreign-language accent imitation to explore production and perception
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 16, 2022
9 Foreign Language Accent Imitation: Matching Production with Perception
Multilingual Matters eBooks, 2023
Polgem – The recorded corpus of Polish geminate consonants
Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
The report describes the recorded corpus of Polish geminate consonants. It is available at It con... more The report describes the recorded corpus of Polish geminate consonants. It is available at It contains 111 words with double consonant letters produced by 54 native speakers of Polish, yielding a total of 5994 recorded tokens. The corpus may be used for future research on the production of Polish geminates or for perception experiments with speakers of other geminating or non-geminating languages. The report provides information on the lexical structure of the corpus, recruited speakers and recording specification. It also contains basic statistics of the rate of observed degemination and rearticulation.
Katowice : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego eBooks, 2019
The article discusses selected issues in teaching English pronunciation to Polish learners at the... more The article discusses selected issues in teaching English pronunciation to Polish learners at the university level. The main assumption is that metacompetence and practical training are inseparable in that they interact effectively in successful pronunciation pedagogy. We discuss segmental issues, such as vowel category learning and teaching stop aspiration. Next, we proceed to suprasegmental elements, such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. We attempt to show how integrating students' general knowledge of linguistics with various training tasks in speech perception and production may lead to improved production and perception in English.
Phonetic imitation of t-glottaling by Czech speakers of English
Linguistica Pragensia
LINGUISTICA SILESIANA, 2017
In the current study, we test the discrimination of four basic English tone contours in monosylla... more In the current study, we test the discrimination of four basic English tone contours in monosyllabic words by Polish learners using an AXB task and we compare these results to the results of an identifi cation test. Discrimination does not require access to phonological labels and is claimed to tap core auditory mechanism. Relatively high discrimination performance by Polish learners and poor identifi cation performance indicate that diffi culties with correct identifi cation of English tones are solely diffi culties with labelling.
The perception of rearticulated and single-articulated geminates in Polish
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 2022
Research in Language, 2021
This paper analyses the way that Polish learners of English articulate plosive and affricate cons... more This paper analyses the way that Polish learners of English articulate plosive and affricate consonants preceding another obstruent occlusive in both L1 and L2. Considering that English allows unreleased plosives before any stop, that is in a wider range of contexts than Polish, a Polish learner may find it confusing that it is regarded unacceptable to block the affricate release before another (in English always homorganic) affricate. In Polish the first of two homorganic affricates is often reduced to the occlusion phase, while unreleased plosives appear very rarely in non-homorganic contexts. This apparent paradox in the treatment of affricate and plosive consonant clusters may lead to complicated transfer patterns, which we examine by observing the release suppression tendencies in Polish and English phrases and sentences read by phonetically trained and untrained Polish learners of English. The results indicate strong negative transfer tendencies and suggest a connection betwee...
The study investigates how their own accent in English is self-perceived by Polish learners. More... more The study investigates how their own accent in English is self-perceived by Polish learners. More specifically, we compare how, and to what extent, self-reported pronunciation differs from self-rated pronunciation prior to and after the exposure to one’s recorded speech. Previous research on non-native accent rating has concentrated on scores obtained from native speakers or other proficient speakers of English. In the current study, we concentrate on how learners evaluate their own accent in English for parameters such as pronunciation, articulation, and fluency. We also introduce an independent variable of proficiency to see if it interacts with the perception of learners’ pronunciation. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted and the result showed that there are no major differences between how learners report their accent in English and how they rate it from the recording of their own speech. It indicates that the general self-image of one’s accent is fairly st...
Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition, 2020
This paper addresses the issue of speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation. In natural ... more This paper addresses the issue of speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation. In natural recordings, it is impossible to disentangle rhythm from segmental, subphonemic or suprasegmental features that may influence nativeness ratings. However, two methods of speech manipulation, that is, backwards content-masked speech and vocoded speech, allow the identification of native and non-native speech in which segmental properties are masked and become inaccessible to the listeners. In the current study, we use these two methods to compare the perception of content-masked native English speech and Polish-accented speech. Both native English and Polish-accented recordings were manipulated using backwards masked speech and 4-band white-noise vocoded speech. Fourteen listeners classified the stimuli as produced by native or Polish speakers of English. Polish and English differ in their temporal organization, so, if rhythm is a significant contributor to the status of non-native accente...
The study investigates rearticulated affricate geminates in Polish. Polish has voiceless affricat... more The study investigates rearticulated affricate geminates in Polish. Polish has voiceless affricates with three different places of articulation, all of which undergo gemination. Twenty-three native speakers of Polish produced words with intervocalic affricate geminates in two sentence positions. Rearticulation occurred in 76.5% of the productions. Durational measurements revealed that the first affricate had a significantly longer closure phase and a shorter frication release than the rearticulated affricate. The frication release in the second consonant tended to have higher maximum and mean intensity, however the difference was not significant. These results are interpreted to reflect bidirectional alignment of the two articulations to two different syllables.
Powtórz pary wyrazów, zwracając uwagę na kontrast samogłosek. Pamiętaj o jednakowej intonacji. 10... more Powtórz pary wyrazów, zwracając uwagę na kontrast samogłosek. Pamiętaj o jednakowej intonacji. 104 13 13.2. Pisownia wyrazów z /eI/ Wyrazy z /eI/, co naturalne, zawierają literę <a> w różnych konfiguracjach. u <aCe>: 13.2 ace, lake, face, same, taste 41 v <ai>, <ay>-to drugie preferowane na końcu wyrazu. 13.3 wait, pay, main, stay w <ey>, <ei>: 13.4 prey, grey, eight Nietypowe słowa z /eI/ 13.5 great, break, gauge, gaol, bass 13.3. Pisownia wyrazów z /aI/ Wyrazy z /aI/, co zrozumiałe, zawierają naturalnie literę <i> w różnych konfiguracjach. Na końcu wyrazu w sylabie akcentowanej 42 zwykle pojawia się <y>. u <iCe>: 41 Jak widać, zdarzają się również zbitki liter spółgłoskowych, które nie wykluczają wymowy dyftongu. 42 W sylabie nieakcentowanej wymawiamy oczywiście /I/.
Release Burst in Polish Homorganic Stop Geminates
The paper discusses the role segmental and subsegmental duration in the organization of a sound s... more The paper discusses the role segmental and subsegmental duration in the organization of a sound system in English and Polish. It analyses how duration contributes to signaling phonological phenomena such as voicing, words stress and word boundary. Special emphasis is put on cross-linguistic differences between English and Polish and how those differences emerge in the process of learning English by speakers of Polish. Artykuł omawia rolę długości na poziomie całego segmentu oraz jego poszczególnej cechy w organizacji systemu dźwiękowego języka angielskiego i polskiego. Analizuje on, jak długość wykorzystywana jest w realizacji zjawisk fonologicznych, takich jak dźwięczność, akcent wyrazowy czy granica słowa. Główny nacisk położony jest na kontrastywne różnice między językiem angielskim i polskim oraz na to jak różnice te ujawniają się w procesie uczenia się języka angielskiego przez Polaków.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2019
The effects of musicality and language background on cue integration in pitch perception
Language Acquisition, 2018
Word segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1 because many, though not all, cues to signal w... more Word segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1 because many, though not all, cues to signal word boundaries appear to be largely languagespecific. Native English listeners use short-lag versus long-lag VOTs in segmenting pairs such as Lou spills versus loose pills. Polish contrasts negative versus short-lag VOTs, so speakers of Polish are expected to be largely insensitive to this English word-boundary cue. Forty-three lowerproficiency and 26 higher-proficiency Polish learners of English segmented English words from VOT cues. Both accuracy and RT measures were analyzed. The results showed that the general accuracy was 59%, identical to Spanish (Altenberg 2005) and French speakers (Shoemaker 2014) and lower than that for Japanese speakers (Ito & Strange 2009). There was no difference between segmenting aspirated and unaspirated onsets in accuracy or RTs. Higher proficiency did not lead to more successful segmentation, but higher-proficiency listeners were faster in their decisions.
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Papers by Arkadiusz Rojczyk