Arkadiusz Rojczyk

University of Silesia in Katowice · Institute of Linguistics

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 re...

Geminates (such as the double /k/ in Polish lekki “light”) form a group of consonants that are mainly characterized by longer durations than the corresponding singletons. Most of the research has concentrated on durational and spectral properties of geminates in contrast to singletons. Much less attention has been paid to the realization of the voi...

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....

The study investigates to what extent rearticulation observed in Polish geminates may be imitated by speakers of Catalan, a language with single-articulated geminates. Polish geminates have optional rearticulation, which appears to be a unique feature of Polish compared to other languages with consonantal gemination. To our knowledge, this is the f...

The paper focuses on the ability of Czech speakers to explicitly imitate native English realizations of the phoneme /t/ as [ʔ] (t-glottaling). In Czech, glottalization occurs as a boundary signal of wordinitial vocalic onsets. We hypothesize that this allows for a better imitative performance in the intervocalic context as compared to non-prevocali...

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 speaker...

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 unacceptabl...

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, al...

Polish is a geminating language with true lexical geminates that form minimal pairs with their singleton counterparts. What is more, Polish, unlike many other geminating languages, allows both single-articulated and rearticulated geminate realisations. In this study, durational properties of Polish geminates together with preceding and following vo...

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....

This paper reports on the perception-related part of a study of the acquisition of English word stress by Polish learners. The learners, first-year and third/fourth-year English studies majors, of which only the latter had undergone practical training in English prosody, participated in speeded identification and discrimination tasks revealing thei...

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 efffectively in successful pronunciation pedagogy. We discuss segmental issues such as vowel category learning and teaching stop a...

Polish is considered to be a language with no phonological vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. If vowel reduction does not have a phonological function, unstressed vowels are expected to be relatively stable in their quality and duration compared to stressed vowels. However, previous reports have suggested that Polish unstressed vowels may ind...

The purpose of the study was to analyse human identification of Polish vowels from static and dynamic durationally slowed visual cues. A total of 152 participants identified 6 Polish vowels produced by 4 speakers from static (still images) and dynamic (videos) cues. The results show that 59% of static vowels and 63% of dynamic vowels were successfu...

Word segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1, because many, however not all, cues to signal word boundaries appear to be largely language-specific. Native English listeners use short-lag vs. long-lag VOTs in segmenting pairs such as Lou spills vs. loose pills. Polish contrasts negative vs. short-lag VOTs, so speakers of Polish are expected to...

This paper focuses on the relations between conscious and subconscious aspects of English word stress acquisition. Using two tasks–reading and written word stress identification, we test metacompetence and production accuracy in the pronunciation of Polish learners, first year and third year English studies majors. The analysis of the collected dat...

In this talk we presented out current work with FMC in visual identification of vowels. We also discussed how this technology may be used to study vowels in second-language speech. The study was supported under the grant Methodology and technology for the polymodal allophonic speech transcription (No. 2015/17/B/ST6/01874) from the National Science...

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 identification test. Discrimination does not require access to phonological labels and is claimed to tap core auditory mechanism. Relatively high discrimina...

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 obtai...

The study investigates the perception of devoicing of English /w, r, j, l/ after /p, t, k/ as a word-boundary cue by Polish listeners. Polish does not devoice sonorants following voiceless stops in word-initial positions. As a result, Polish learners are not made sensitive to sonorant devoicing as a segmentation cue. Higher-proficiency and lower-pr...

The article proposes the elicitation technique based on FL accent imitation in L1 for FL speech research. The assumption of the proposed technique is that learners will transfer those FL phonetic features into L1 that they perceive as salient or characteristic, which may be helpful in establishing a hierarchy of FL pronunciation features and their...

This paper reports on selected results of a large-scale questionnaire study conducted among Polish students of English. Continuing the tradition of pronunciation attitude surveys in Poland, the present study concentrates on a possible relationship between what students perceive as correct pronunciation and a Polish accent in English in corresponden...

Only a small amount of research has been devoted to the phonetics of code-switching in the speech of bilinguals. The studies that do exist have shown conflicting results with regard to the appearance and direction of cross-language interaction, and are limited in the types of participants and phonetic parameters that have been investigated. This pa...

Acoustic phonetic studies examine the L1 of Polish speakers with professional level proficiency in English. The studies include two tasks, a production task carried out entirely in Polish and a phonetic code-switching task in which speakers insert target Polish words or phrases into an English carrier. Additionally, two phonetic parameters are stud...

This paper presents a set of word monitoring experiments with Polish learners of English. Listeners heard short recordings of native English speech, and were instructed to respond when they recognized an English target word that had been presented on a computer screen. Owing to phonological considerations, we compared reaction times to two types of...

The paper reports on an experiment designed to investigate the interpretation and misinterpretation of Polish sentences such as Gdy Jan pisał list spadł z biurka (e.g. “While John was writing the letter fell off a desk”), paralleling English garden path sentences such as While John hunted the deer ran into the woods. The locally ambiguous NP-V-NP r...

Advanced second language (henceforth L2) learners in a formal setting can suppress many first language (henceforth L1) processes in L2 pronunciation when provided with sufficient exposure to L2 and meta competence (see Sect. 4 for a definition of this term). This paper shows how imitation in L2 teaching can be enhanced on the basis of current phone...

Although there is little consensus on the relevance of non-contrastive allophonic processes in L2 speech acquisition, EFL pronunciation textbooks cover the suppression of stop release in coda position. The tendency for held stops in English is in stark opposition to a number of other languages, including Polish, in which plosive release is obligato...

The study reproduces pilot work concerned with the imitation of English vowel duration by Polish learners (Zając 2013). Its aim was to expand on the findings of the previous study, i.e. determine if the magnitude of imitation may depend on the native/non-native status of the model talker and investigate whether the provision of explicit instruction...

Experimental phonetic studies examine the extent to which Polish learners of English acquire phonological processes occurring at word boundaries in the target language. In particular, we look at linking of vowel-initial words and the suppression of stop release in word-final stops. Our results suggest that glottalization of vowels, which blocks lin...

Polish is a language where true geminates appear and the occurrence of a double consonant letter in spelling corresponds with double or at least prolonged consonant articulation regardless of the morphological structure of the word. The above principle also concerns most borrowings, such as the English word ‘hobby’, for instance. In English, true g...

The paper investigates immediate and distracted imitation in second-language speech using unreleased plosives. Unreleased plosives are fairly frequently found in English sequences of two stops. Polish, on the other hand, is characterised by a significant rate of releases in such sequences. This cross-linguistic difference served as material to look...

Arkadiusz Rojczyk is an Assistant Professor at University of Silesia in Poland. His research concentrates on production and perception of second language speech, speech analysis and resynthesis. He is currently working on vowel perception and production in second-language speech ABSTRACT The current study investigates the production of L2 vowels in...

The paper reports results from a study on the perception of vowel quality and duration as a stress cue in English by Polish learners of English. The word record was synthesised in which F0 was held constant and vowel quality and duration were manipulated to obtain three different types of interaction. The two parameters could remain neutral as to t...

The paper discusses selected methodological issues in second-language speech research. It concentrates more specifically on participant selection and experimental designs used in speech research. It begins by discussing variables in the selection of bilingual participants. These variables have been demonstrated to influence performance of bilingual...

PRIMINGOWYM The study investigates priming effects on automatic activation of stereotypical male-female personality traits and compares the magnitude of those effects with ratings obtained from a 1-5 Likert scale questionnaires on the same traits. Twenty-two male and twenty-two female stereotypical personality traits were used in both studies to as...

Speech is almost never delivered in ideal quiet conditions. On the contrary, the acoustic signal reaching a listener's ears is degraded by background noise and reverberations. The current study investigates the perception of the voicing contrast of initial stops in English by Polish non-native listeners. Previous research showed that Polish learner...

The study investigates sound symbolism, concentrating on vowel quality, duration, and pitch in sound-to-size correspondences. Thirty-one native speakers of Polish were asked to rate presented stimuli on a 1-7 point scale ranging from "small" to "big". The stimuli consisted of/CVC/sequences, with all six non-nasalized Polish vowels, blocked in three...

BAARTJOAN, A field manual of acoustic phonetics. Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2010. Pp. 127. ISBN: 978-1-55671-232-6. - Volume 41 Issue 1 - Arkadiusz Rojczyk

The study aims to determine the role of duration in production and perception of /ae/ by Polish learners of English relative to neighbouring English /e/ and //. The results show that, in production, /ae/ and // are spectrally subsumed by Polish /a/. To dissimilate these two vowels, learners reweight the cue hierarchy to rely on increased durations...

Forming New Vowel Categories in Second Language Speech: The Case of Polish Learners' Production of English /I/ and /e/ The paper concentrates on formation of L2 English vowel categories in the speech of Polish learners. More specifically, it compares distribution of two English categories - /I/ and /e/ relative to neighbouring Polish vowels. 43 par...

BRAT ADAMA VS BRATA DAMA: TEMPORAL PHONETIC PARAMETERS SIGNALLING WORD BOUNDARIES IN POLISH The paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of temporal phonetic parameters cueing word boundaries in Polish. Durational variability has been well documented for different languages. Word-final lengthening, word-initial lengthening, and polysyllab...