Václav Jonáš Podlipský

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Palacký University Olomouc

Mastering prosody is a different task for adults learning a second language and infants acquiring their first. While prosody crucially aids the process of L1 acquisition, for adult L2 learners it is often considerably challenging. Is it because of an age-related decline in the language-learning ability or because of unfavorable learning conditions?...

Mastering prosody is a different task for adults learning a second language and infants acquiring their first. While prosody crucially aids the process of L1 acquisition, for adult L2 learners it is often considerably challenging. Is it because of an age-related decline of the language-learning ability or because of unfavourable learning conditions...

Previous research on perceptual adaptation in vowels has attested generalization of retuning across vowel-height counterparts. Our study tested for a lab-induced chain shift. In a lexical decision task, we exposed U.S. English participants to words with either raised or lowered tokens of /i/, along with unmanipulated back vowels but no other front...

We assessed the regional accent of young educated urban-dwellers from Czech Silesia and measured their phonetic accommodation in (in)formal situations. Silesian Czech reduces the vowel length contrast existing in Common Czech. We compared the duration of /aː/ produced by 12 Silesians and 6 Common Czech controls, as well as accent ratings of these s...

This study tests the efficacy of a pronunciation course in developing advanced EFL learners’ expressive reading during a semester of online instruction. The course, designed for future English-language professionals, emphasises primacy of perception before production, the importance of noticing phonetic detail, expert and peer feedback, and context...

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhyt...

The perceptual attunement to native vowel categories has been reported to occur at 6 months of age. However, some languages contrast vowels both in quality and in length, and whether and how the acquisition of spectral and duration-cued contrasts differs is uncertain. This study traced the development of infants' sensitivity to native (Czech) vowel...

Seeing a person’s mouth move for [ga] while hearing [ba] often results in the perception of “da.” Such audiovisual integration of speech cues, known as the McGurk effect, is stable within but variable across individuals. When the visual or auditory cues are degraded, due to signal distortion or the perceiver’s sensory impairment, reliance on cues v...

Purpose The interconnectedness of phonological categories between the two languages of early bilinguals has previously been explored using single-probe speech production and perception data. Our goal was to tap into bilingual phonological representations in another way, namely via monitoring instances of phonetic drift due to changes in language ex...

Purpose: The interconnectedness of phonological categories between the two languages of early bilinguals has previously been explored using single-probe speech production and perception data. Our goal was to tap into bilingual phonological representations in another way, namely via monitoring instances of phonetic drift due to changes in language e...

Vowel length contrasts in quantity languages are typically realized primarily through duration. This study tested whether spectral cues contribute to the perceptual identification of the short-long monophthongal contrasts in two varieties of Czech. Results showed that listeners attend to spectrum as well as to duration, both for the high vowel-leng...

We use the freely available program Praat to create a vowel-training application for learners of English familiar with IPA transcription. The application is easy to operate, allowing users to change the training difficulty, providing the listeners with immediate feedback, and adapting to their performance during a training session. To evaluate the...

Previous research indicates that alternating between a bilingual’s languages during speech production can lead to short-term increases in cross-language phonetic interaction. However, discrepancies exist between the reported L1–L2 effects in terms of direction and magnitude, and sometimes the effects are not found at all. The present study focused...

Ultimate attainment in foreign-language sound learning is addressed via vowel production accuracy in English spoken by advanced Czech EFL learners. English FLEECE–KIT, DRESS–TRAP, and GOOSE–FOOT contrasts are examined in terms of length, height, and backness. Our data show that, while being constrained by phonemic category assimilation (new vowel h...

Whether late learners discern fine phonetic detail in second-language (L2) input, form new phonetic categories, and realize them accurately remains a relevant question in L2 phonology, especially for foreign-language (FL) learning characterized by limited exposure to interactional native input. Our study focuses on advanced Czech learners’ producti...

Listeners usually understand without difficulty even speech that sounds atypical. When they encounter noncanonical realizations of speech sounds, listeners can make short-term adjustments of their long-term representations of those sounds. Previous research, focusing mostly on adaptation in consonants, has suggested that for perceptual adaptation t...

Recent studies of short-term phonetic interference suggest that code-switching can lead to momentary increases in L1 influence on L2. In an earlier study using a single acoustic measure (VOT), we found that Czech EFL learners’ pronunciation of English voiceless stops had shorter, i.e. more L1-Czech-like, VOTs in code-switched compared to L2-only se...

Some (though not all) previous studies have documented the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB), i.e. the greater intelligibility of non-native (relative to native) speech to non-native listeners as compared to native listeners. Moreover, some studies (again not all) found that native listeners consider foreign-accented statements as...

This study addresses disagreement between previous studies about the hypothesis that phonetic imitation does not occur if it would threaten a phonological contrast. Using a within-subject pretest-shadowing-posttest design, we tested imitability of reduction and extension of prevoicing and vowel duration in Czech, a vowel-quantity language with prev...

VOT of English voiceless stops produced by L1-dominant Czech-English bilinguals is examined in light of three hypotheses: (1) switching languages induces an immediate increase in L1 interference, (2) speakers experienced with switching languages show less immediate interference, and (3) interpreting induces greater interference than code-switching....

This study explores whether speech connectedness increases with accelerated tempo in non‐native pronunciation. In Czech‐accented English, speech is disrupted by excessive glottalization of word‐initial vowels. We hypothesized that, when speaking fast, advanced Czech learners of English as a foreign language may glottalize less because (1) they orga...

This study explored effects of simultaneous use of late bilinguals’ languages on their second-language (L2) pronunciation. We tested (1) if bilinguals effectively inhibit the first language (L1) when simultaneously processing L1 and L2, (2) if bilinguals, like natives, imitate subphonemic variation, (3) if bilinguals’ imitation operates crosslingui...

As a western Slavic language of the Indo-European family, Czech is closest to Slovak and Polish. It is spoken as a native language by nearly 10 million people in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office n.d.). About two million people living abroad, mostly in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the UK, claim Czech heritage (Ministr...

Naive listeners' perceptual assimilations of non-native vowels to first-language (L1) categories can predict difficulties in the acquisition of second-language vowel systems. This study demonstrates that listeners having two slightly different dialects as their L1s can differ in the perception of foreign vowels. Specifically, the study shows that B...

We investigate whether there is a within-speaker effect of a higher F0 on the values of the first and the second formant. When asked to speak at a high F0, speakers turn out to raise their formants as well. In the F1 dimension this effect is greater for women than for men. We conclude that while a general formant raising effect might be due to the...

We investigate the perception and production of Czech /I/ and /i:/, a contrast traditionally described as quantitative. First, we show that the spectral difference between the vowels is for many Czechs as strong a cue as (or even stronger than) duration. Second, we test the hypothesis that this shift towards vowel quality as a perceptual cue for th...

L2 acquisition may involve reattuning the perceptual system so that a cue becomes utilized for a new linguistic purpose. For instance, if vowel duration cues stress in L1 (like in English), whereas in L2 it marks phonological vowel quantity (like in Czech) it is of interest how the perception of stress and of vowel quantity will interact. Previous...

When acquiring the phonology of a second language (L2), a learner may have to dissociate a perceptual cue from what it marked in the first language (L1) and attach it to another linguistic entity. This study examined the acquisition of Czech vowel quantity by native speakers of American English. In Czech, vowel duration is reserved for cuing shortl...

Acquiring L2 vowel quantity can be difficult for native speakers of languages like English where vowel duration cues stress. This study tested whether English learners of Czech would categorize short and long vowels in a stressed or in an unstressed syllable differently than native listeners. The role of L2 experience was also explored. Results sho...

This study focused on language-independent principles functioning in acquisition of second language (L2) contrasts. Specifically, it tested Bohn's Desensitization Hypothesis [in Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in Cross Language Research, edited by W. Strange (York Press, Baltimore, 1995)] which predicted that Greek speakers of E...

It is possible that in Czech a vowel is consistently longer before a tautosyllabic voiced as opposed to voiceless obstruent. The main purpose of this study was to determine if this hypothesized variation interacts with the perception of vowel quantity. Two experiments were conducted that examined the effect of a voiceless vs. devoiced coda context...