Arabisktalendes realiseringer af de danske klusiler

Abstract

This article investigates how L2 speakers of Danish with Arabic as L1 realize the Danish plosives word-initially compared to native speakers of Danish. The comparison is primarily based on recordings of structured speech as well as spontaneous speech, and the realizations are evaluated based on measurements of voice onset time (VOT). The findings are that the L2 speakers’ VOT values of the Danish plosives are significantly lower than those of the L1 speakers of Danish (/b/ excluded), but that the L2 speakers generally succeed in realizing the plosives as L1 speakers a fair amount of the time. The plosive /p/ is an exception, as very few Arabic speakers realize /p/ as expected for Danish L1 speakers, whereas these realizations often coincide with the L1 realizations of /b/. These results agree with the findings for Arabic speakers of English.

The ability of the L2 speakers to produce the plosives as L1 speakers is shown to be correlated with experience, but not with the speakers’ age of acquisition of Danish. The speakers’ ability to produce a distinction between /p-b/ is correlated with neither experience nor age of acquisition. Due to these findings, and to the Arabic speakers’ apparent difficulty with especially /p/ it is suggested that this plosive receives a special focus in teaching Danish pronunciation to Arabic L1 speakers learning Danish as an L2.

[One sentence on page 36-37 has been revised on 10 February 2020]