Native-like Duration Ratio of Stressed vs. Unstressed Syllables through Visualizing Prosody

Japanese language learners of stress-timed languages like English (L2) or German (L3) have problems acquiring the prosody of these languages. The questions are, how to teach prosody in this context efficiently, and – specifically – what role visualizations play in the acquisition of accentuation. Therefore a reading experiment was undertaken, as reported here, in which students read out texts in three formats, among them a curved text with prosody-encoding size variations called prosodic writing (PW). In a pre-test, students read a normal text; in a post-test they read PW. Additionally, access possibilities to corresponding audio files varied among students. The following results were obtained for the accentuation of the German word “zentral” [tsɛnltraːl]: (1) there was a substantial increase in correct accentuation among the 15 students reading PW; (2) of these, all five students without access to audio files corrected their accentuation; and (3) for four of these five, the duration ratio of stressed to unstressed syllables approached the ratio of a native speaker (>2:1). Visualizations might therefore be an efficient tool for teaching certain aspects of prosody.