3.1 Methodology

In my research, I decided to have a look at the linguistic features of two speakers. Informant A, a 26 year old, male, native speaker who was born and raised in South Hampton, England and speaker B, a 23 year old, female learner of English, born and raised in Bamberg, Germany who has been living in South England for 5 years.

Both speakers have had plenty of opportunity to interact with one another, due to a shared living environment.

For this analysis I recorded the story “The North Wind and the Sun” with both speakers in order to detect differences in pronunciation more easily. Nevertheless, the recording displayed an artificial speech situation as both speakers were fully aware of me recording them. Therefore, the research did not bring forth any new features of language change, but instead elicited the differences between the native speaker's and the learner's speech style, which still existed despite the latter's longer period of residence in England.

I concentrated on an acoustic investigation, focusing mainly on a formant analysis of vowels. Since “The North Wind and the Sun” provides only one realization of some vowels, I used the average values whenever I had more than one realization and the normal value whenever I had only one realization. I used the Gerstman-end-transformation to normalize the formants, and created a speaker specific vowel chart. I also looked at the length and intensity of word ending consonants and tried to find out if final devoicing was still present in the English learner's speech.

The aim of this study was to discover the differences and similarities in pronunciation.

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