Naturalness Judgement of L2 English Through Dubbing Practice

This Study investigates how different prosodic features affect native speakers' perception of L2 English spoken by Chinese students through dubbing, or re-voicing practice on video clips. Learning oral foreign language through dubbing on movie or animation clips has become very popular in China. In this practice, learners try to reproduce utterances as closely as possible to the original speech by closely matching lip movements on the clips. The L2 utterances before and after substantial dubbing practices were recorded and categorized according to different prosodic error patterns. Objective acoustic features were extracted and analyzed with naturalness scores based on perceptual experiment. Experimental results show that stress and timing play key roles in native speakers' perception of naturalness. With the practice of dubbing, prosodic features, especially timing, can be considerably improved and thus the naturalness of the reproduced utterances increases.