Training of English prosody with acoustically modified voices

Abstract Prosodic aspects of speech are crucial for the comprehensibility of L2 speakers, but prosody is rarely targeted in English language lessons. This paper describes an innovative training of English phrasal prosody using participants’ own speech as models in a modified listen-and-repeat paradigm, with their melodic and rhythmic patterns manipulated by means of PSOLA. The two-hour training was delivered individually to twelve intermediate native speakers of Czech. The comparison of a baseline recording of a read text before the training and two texts read six weeks after the training shows that using one’s own PSOLA-modified voice for prosody training is beneficial: the participants were perceived as sounding significantly more competent in the after-training recordings, their phrasing corresponded more to text-based predictions, and their melodic variability was significantly greater. The contribution of targeted prosody modifications in the teaching of L2 pronunciation are discussed.