Weeks 13-14: From Back to Front

This week, I started by analyzing some of my previous recordings. I noticed that over the course of the semester my stress, prominence and intonation have consistently improved. My overal quality (nasality and velarization) also sounds better. However, my vowels on the other hand are a different story. They improved when I was specifically working on them but have since dropped back toward American the comfortable American production, particularly with the /eu/, /i/ and /ae/ sounds. I also am having a lot of trouble with inserting American r-fulness into places where it shouldn't be. Finally, I noticed that my specific words and phonemes are much worse at the end of the monologue than at the beginning. This probably reflects the amount of time I've spent working on each section. So, this week my goals are:

       1) Work more on the last 1/3 of the archetype, some on the middle third, and little on the first third

       2) Drill difficult vowels, with the goal of producing them both in an appropriate location (depending on stressed or reduced) and the appropriate length (I'm over-lengthening and over-shortening some of the vowels when I compare my speech to my archetype's speech)

      3) Drill words with problem /r/ sounds, either present or absent, so that my speech will be smoother.

I listened to the archetype and then my own speech. On my vowel transcription pages that I used earlier in the semester, I circled those words that had some serious problems in pausing, consonant changes, vowel rounding and phrase/vowel length. Here is a list of the segments in my archetype that I chose to drill. The majority (but not all) are from the last half of the archetype. Additionally, I numbered lines so that I could refer to each problem's location in the transcript:

Here's the link to this week's audio recording: Week 13 attempt

 Listening to this, although I did trip myself up a few times, the last third of the speech was MUCH better than before. I sound much more natural. I can see how practice really helps. However, I wonder how much this kind of focused practice transfers over into using the accent in another way? In my last blog post I will continue refining my archetype one more time and reflect on what I have learned from the process of doing this project.