Browsing by Author "Ihalin, Meeri"

Background and the aims of the study. Previous studies show that adult immigrants face chal-lenges especially in producing diphthongs and differences in Finnish speech sound lengths. However, to date there has been no evaluation method to assess immigrant’s pronunciation in Finnish. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Phonology test is applicable for assessing adult immigrant’s pronunciation of Finnish. This applicability was assessed by examining what the results of the Phonology test revealed about research subject’s pronun-ciation, how these results differed from the ones of a sentence test, which was developed for this study in particular, how well they recognised the words in the Phonology test. In addition, how and for whom the test could be applicable in future were also studied. Research subjects and methods. The study was carried out as a comperative multi-case stu-dy in which the data was examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. The data was obtai-ned as a part of a PhD dissertation at The University of the Arts Helsinki examining the effects of choir singing in adult immigrant’s Finnish language learning. The research data consisted of ten adult immigrant’s recordings and research forms of the Phonology test and sentence test. The data were statistically analysed with SPSS-program using a dependent sample t-test and the Pearson correlation coefficient. Results and conclusions. All research subjects received rather good scores in the Phonology test and there was not any significant deviation. The results of the Phonology test and the sentence test were quite similar in terms of the mean difference in speech sound length. The pronounciation challenges appeared in the Phonology test were also found in the sentence test and vice versa. The subjects were able to produce short speech sounds distincly shorter than long speech sounds in almost every word in the sentence test. Principally, the subjects recognised the words in the Phonology test well. Based on these results, the Phonology test was moderately applicable to assess adult immigrants’ pronunciation of Finnish.