TRANSPLANTING NATIVE PROSODY INTO SECOND LANGUAGE SPEECH

In this study we will describe the technique for superimposing the prosodic features of a native speaker’s utterance (donor) onto the same utterance produced by a non-native speaker (receiver). Particular attention will be given to the specific problems of L2 speech and operational suggestions on the procedure to follow will be provided. Suprasegmental features cannot be straightly transferred from one voice to another, but a neutralization process must occur before any transposing operation in order to avoid voice mismatch phenomena, which could alter listeners’ perception. Two different kinds of transplanting procedure, global and selective, will be described in detail. The transplantion technique can be very useful in many fields of research and can be a practical tool for the assessment of the perceptual correlates of acoustic features.