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CAN CAPTIONED VIDEO BENEFIT SECOND LANGUAGE PRONUNCIATION?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2020

Natalia Wisniewska Open the ORCID record for Natalia Wisniewska [Opens in a new window]  and
Joan C. Mora Open the ORCID record for Joan C. Mora [Opens in a new window]
Natalia Wisniewska*
Affiliation:
University of Barcelona, Barcelona
Joan C. Mora
Affiliation:
University of Barcelona, Barcelona
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Natalia Wisniewska, Departament de Llengues i Literatures Modernes i Estudis Anglesos, Facultat de Filolgia, Universitat de Barcelona. Gran Via de les Corts Casatalanes, 558.08007 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

The present study investigated the potential benefits of extended exposure to captioned videos for second language pronunciation. We tested 90 L2 adult learners of English on speech processing skills (segmentation, speed of lexical access, and sentence processing) and phonological accuracy in perception (ABX discrimination) and production (accentedness ratings) before and after an 8-week treatment consisting of regular exposure to audiovisual materials. Participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions involving two viewing modes (captioned or uncaptioned) and two task focus conditions (focus on phonetic form or focus on meaning). Results showed benefits in speech segmentation and speech processing skills irrespective of viewing mode. No significant benefits were found for phonological accuracy in perception. In production, a focus on phonetic form improved pronunciation only in the absence of captions, whereas captioned viewing led to pronunciation gains as long as there was no focus on phonetic form. These findings suggest that pronunciation improvement can take place with the help of captions or, in the absence of captions, when learners’ attention is directed to pronunciation. Cognitive overload might explain why no benefits were obtained when attention was directed to pronunciation in a captioned viewing mode.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 42 , Special Issue 3: Language Learning from Multimodal Input , July 2020 , pp. 599 - 624
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the editors of this special volume and two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article. The study reported in this article was supported by grants FFI 2016-80564R from MINECO and FI-DGR 2017 from AGAUR.

References

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