Lengthenings and filled pauses in Hungarian adults’ and children’s speech

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly in their position in the speech session between the age groups, which has implications regarding different planning strategies of adults and children. We also draw conclusions regarding the methodological considerations in the issue of identifying vowel lengthening supporting a previously formulated conception

Choosing a threshold for silent pauses to measure second language fluency

Second language (L2) research often involves analyses of acoustic measures of fluency. The studies investigating fluency, however, have been difficult to compare because the measures of fluency that were used differed widely. One of the differences between studies concerns the lower cut-off point for silent pauses, which has been set anywhere between 100 ms and 1000 ms. The goal of this paper is to find an optimal cut-off point. We calculate acoustic measures of fluency using different pause thresholds and then relate these measures to a measure of L2 proficiency and to ratings on fluency

The duration of filled pauses and prolongations in northern and southern dialects of Spanish

This research focuses on the prosodic patterns of hesitations contrasted in Northern and Southern dialects of European Spanish, more precisely, on their duration. A corpus of 200 spontaneous utterances has been compiled (including 100 utterances from the northern dialects and 100 utterances from the southern ones, produced by 16 male and 16 female informants, respectively). The analysis has been carried out following the standardization protocol offered by Cantero (2019), in which the representative values of duration (in seconds) are taken for each syllable, and then these values undergo a process of standardization, in order to be comparable objectively and speaker-independently. Due to difficulties in establishing exact syllable boundaries in Spanish, it is not the relative duration of the syllables, but rather the relative duration of the distances between intensity peaks which is compared. It is expected that certain “neutral” hesitations –lengthenings and filled pauses with no specific communicative function – show durational differences in the examined dialects, as Southern dialects are considered to be of higher speech rate due to frequent segment elision than northern ones. This would imply that the relative duration of the examined hesitation phenomena with respect to its context– supposedly of the same absolute duration as in the northern dialects – is longer in the southern dialects. According to the results, nevertheless, Southern dialects present shorter absolute duration also in case of hesitation phenomena, and thus relative duration of hesitation phenomena with respect to their context coincide in the two examined Spanish variants

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)

Elementary School L2 English Teachers’ Language Performance and Children’s Second Language Acquisition

This doctoral dissertation investigates the linguistic performance of German elementary school English teachers and how their second language (L2) English performance relates to their students' acquisition of English as a foreign language. The studies reflect the teachers' L2 language performance, give insights into the interrelationships of the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) dimensions of L2 language production, and finally address how linguistic performance relates to the students' L2 development. Following a mixed-methods approach, the first study analyzed the language performance elicited in semi-structured qualitative interviews with eleven German elementary school English teachers based on CAF measures. The second study focuses on the students' language development of a sub-set of four of the interviewed teachers. The students (N = 132) were given picture pointing tasks of either receptive grammar, receptive vocabulary or both at two times during the fourth year of elementary school. The key finding was that the whole group’s mean grammar score significantly improved from time one to time two. The increase of the mean vocabulary score was not statistically significant. When the students were grouped with their respective teachers, comparisons exposed significant differences between some of the groups. The third study synthesizes the teachers’ CAF performance and the students’ development in receptive English grammar and vocabulary. A principal components analysis (PCA) first calculated the variability of the range of the measures for complexity, accuracy, and fluency and their contributions to each CAF dimension. Correlation analyses between the dimensions revealed several robust significant correlations for complexity, accuracy, and fluency as captured in breakdown fluency and speed fluency. Repair fluency and lexical diversity correlated with breakdown and speed fluency, but not with accuracy and complexity. Based on the teachers’ composite CAF scores calculated in the PCA and the students’ test scores, the relationships between the teachers’ language performances and their students’ L2 development were analyzed. Multiple regression analyses retained breakdown fluency, measured in the number and length of pauses as part of the fluency dimension, as the only dimension significantly predicting the students’ receptive grammar development. The results point to several conclusions: First, the significant correlations between complexity, accuracy, and fluency in terms of breakdown and speed fluency indicate that the dimensions did not come at the expense of one another in the L2 performance on the cross-sectional interview task used in this study. Second, the students’ significant improvement in receptive English grammar implies some positive development of elementary school L2 English as a whole. However, the high variability among the students’ scores indicates other factors being at play in the children’s L2 development in addition to the teachers’ performance investigated in this study. Third, breakdown fluency as a specific feature of the teachers’ spoken language performance may have a beneficial effect on the children’s receptive English grammar acquisition. This finding is in line with observations of pausing as an element of L2 teacher talk as well as a prosodic feature in child-directed speech in first language acquisition that potentially aids language learners in segmenting linguistic input. The findings propose that future research take into consideration specific features in the L2 input and examine them as possible factors in children’s L2 language acquisition. Der Anhang dieser Veröffentlichung steht ebenfalls als elektronische Publikation im Internet kostenfrei (Open Access) zur Verfügung unter: http://dx.doi.org/10.18442/08

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)