A Short Term Study of Hungarians Learning Finnish Vowels
Citation
Peltola, T., Palo, P. & Aaltonen, O. (2014) A Short Term Study of Hungarians Learning Finnish Vowels, , , , pp. 65-71, Turku, Finland
Abstract
A group of Hungarian students (n=10) participated in a Finnish phonetics and conversation course during the first 3
months of their language studies. During the course, the students trained in the allophonic variation of Finnish speech
sounds, comparing them to Hungarian sounds and participating in group conversation exercises. We call the method
used on the course conscious phonetic training of foreign language speech sounds. Additionally, the students
participated in one-on-one imitating exercises, which were recorded for the current study. We followed the participants'
foreign sounds pronunciation development during the first semester of their studies and compared it to their peers
(n=4). The results suggest that participating in the course affected the students' pronunciation skills towards the end of
the three-month course, whereas, at the beginning, both of the groups' pronunciation was more similar.