INSTRUCTIONAL METHODS FOR PROMOTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORTHOGRAPHIC AND PHONOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS OF INDIC LANGUAGES

In three experiments, I test whether the application of particular instructional principles improves the teaching of the orthographic and phonological systems of Indic languages to second language learners. In Experiment 1, I developed a mobile game that teaches 4th grade children Hindi decoding skills, with an emphasis on complex akshara. There were two versions of the game that varied in terms of stimuli spacing (narrow and wide). I found that the game improved participants’ akshara recognition and their ability to read and spell words that contain complex akshara. Both versions of the game yielded equivalent levels of improvement, but participants played the narrow spacing version faster. Analysis of the game data revealed interesting patterns of common mistakes. Children struggled with akshara that were non-linear and opaque. When spelling words, children struggled when the complex akshara crossed a syllabic boundary and they often made phonological errors. In Experiment 2, I examined whether motor encoding and testing benefit orthographic learning. I found that motor encoding benefits orthographic learning when tasks require pure orthographic knowledge or the production of an orthographic form when given a phonological form. Testing does not benefit beginning learners. In Experiment 3, I tested whether pedagogical differences or individual differences affect the learning of non-native phonemic contrasts. I found that learning of the difficult dental/retroflex contrast can be improved by increasing the voice onset times of the dental sounds. Both English phonological skills and rise time discrimination positively predict learning the non-native contrasts. Furthermore, pairing phonemes with English transliterations impairs discrimination learning, likely because of interference from the English pronunciation. Orthographic support helps people remember which phonemes are in words. Therefore, the use of akshara can benefit second language learners because the graphs are not already associated with phonological referents and the graphs help people remember which phonemes are in vocabulary words. When considered together, these three experiments suggest that multisensory encoding and reducing interference benefit second language learners

L2 Korean Phonology: the acquisition of stops by English-and Finnish-speaking adults

The purpose of this thesis is to find the reason why attaining nativelike pronunciation is difficult in adult L2A. This thesis attempts to take a purely linguistic approach to find it by hypothising that the acquisition of segmental phonology is more than the physical matter of getting the articulators to move correctly and involves phonological rules and principles. The hypothesis was tested through the L2A of Korean stops, which was investigated in three parts; perception of stop segments in word-initial position, production of stop segments in word-initial position and production of stops involving phonological rules constrained by syntax (i.e. the tensification rule vs. the intervocalic voicing rule).Thirteen British English-speaking adults and fifteen Finnish-speaking adults participated in the experiment. The research subjects were divided into three different groups ('Inexperienced I'， 'Inexperienced n' and 'Experienced') according to the length of exposure to Korean. The subjects in the group of 'Inexperienced ľ were exposed to Korean for one year in their native countries, and the subjects in the group of 'Inexperienced 11' for two years in their native countries. The subjects in the group of 'Experienced' attended a Korean language course for one academic year at least in Korea. Firstly, as for perception of stop segments in word-initial position, both English- and Finnish-speaking learners performed better in discerning geminates from non- geminate segment in general. Especially, the two language groups of learners were native-like in discerning a geminate (AA) from a non-geminate of which the segment is different from the ones in the geminate (B). On the contrary, the Korean stops distinguished by the feature [sg] alone have appeared the most difficult for the L2 learners of Korean to acquire. The English- and Finnish-Speaking learners showed a similar pattern of difficulties in discerning Korean stops regarding the feature [sg]; however, differences between the two language groups were also found in the perception of word-initial Korean stops, which were caused by the absence or presence of geminate in the learners' L1. On the other hand, no progress was made by English- and Finnish-speaking learners in the acquisition of Korean stops in accordance with the length of exposure to Korean. Secondly, the production of word-initial stop segments appeared more successful than the perception of them. The difficulty in producing word-initial stops seemed to be caused by Korean-particular phonological representations rather than controlling the degree of VOT values. As for the developmental aspect, English- and Finnish-speaking learners showed the improvement in the segmental production task according to the length of exposure to Korean unlike in the segmental perception task. Thirdly, the English- and Finnish-speaking I earners performed equally poorly on the tensification rule despite the differences in their L1’s. One reason was that the learners in both language groups were not advanced enough to sense the interaction between the phonological rule and syntactic condition in the Korean grammar. Another reason was orthographic influence. Regardless of the two language groups' similarly poor results in performance on the tensification rule, it was presumed that only Finnish speakers would be able to acquire the Korean-specific rule with the supposition that positive L1 transfer might occur at the even advanced stages of learning. In the light of the findings, it was concluded that the hypothesis of this thesis was supported by results from the experiment. Observing that the L2 learners had far greater difficulty in their production of stops involved in the tensification rule constrained by syntax than in their production of word-initial stops, it is concluded that the difficulty of mastering L2 phonology is due to the complexity of phonological rules applying beyond the component of phonology or across phonological domains in the prosodie hierarchy, some of which provide a means for mapping the syntax to the phonology. Therefore, all the complex phonological rules and principles of a segment must be acquired for the target pronunciation

CAPT를 위한 발음 변이 분석 및 CycleGAN 기반 피드백 생성

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :인문대학 협동과정 인지과학전공,2020. 2. 정민화.Despite the growing popularity in learning Korean as a foreign language and the rapid development in language learning applications, the existing computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems in Korean do not utilize linguistic characteristics of non-native Korean speech. Pronunciation variations in non-native speech are far more diverse than those observed in native speech, which may pose a difficulty in combining such knowledge in an automatic system. Moreover, most of the existing methods rely on feature extraction results from signal processing, prosodic analysis, and natural language processing techniques. Such methods entail limitations since they necessarily depend on finding the right features for the task and the extraction accuracies. This thesis presents a new approach for corrective feedback generation in a CAPT system, in which pronunciation variation patterns and linguistic correlates with accentedness are analyzed and combined with a deep neural network approach, so that feature engineering efforts are minimized while maintaining the linguistically important factors for the corrective feedback generation task. Investigations on non-native Korean speech characteristics in contrast with those of native speakers, and their correlation with accentedness judgement show that both segmental and prosodic variations are important factors in a Korean CAPT system. The present thesis argues that the feedback generation task can be interpreted as a style transfer problem, and proposes to evaluate the idea using generative adversarial network. A corrective feedback generation model is trained on 65,100 read utterances by 217 non-native speakers of 27 mother tongue backgrounds. The features are automatically learnt in an unsupervised way in an auxiliary classifier CycleGAN setting, in which the generator learns to map a foreign accented speech to native speech distributions. In order to inject linguistic knowledge into the network, an auxiliary classifier is trained so that the feedback also identifies the linguistic error types that were defined in the first half of the thesis. The proposed approach generates a corrected version the speech using the learners own voice, outperforming the conventional Pitch-Synchronous Overlap-and-Add method.외국어로서의 한국어 교육에 대한 관심이 고조되어 한국어 학습자의 수가 크게 증가하고 있으며, 음성언어처리 기술을 적용한 컴퓨터 기반 발음 교육(Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training; CAPT) 어플리케이션에 대한 연구 또한 적극적으로 이루어지고 있다. 그럼에도 불구하고 현존하는 한국어 말하기 교육 시스템은 외국인의 한국어에 대한 언어학적 특징을 충분히 활용하지 않고 있으며, 최신 언어처리 기술 또한 적용되지 않고 있는 실정이다. 가능한 원인으로써는 외국인 발화 한국어 현상에 대한 분석이 충분하게 이루어지지 않았다는 점, 그리고 관련 연구가 있어도 이를 자동화된 시스템에 반영하기에는 고도화된 연구가 필요하다는 점이 있다. 뿐만 아니라 CAPT 기술 전반적으로는 신호처리, 운율 분석, 자연어처리 기법과 같은 특징 추출에 의존하고 있어서 적합한 특징을 찾고 이를 정확하게 추출하는 데에 많은 시간과 노력이 필요한 실정이다. 이는 최신 딥러닝 기반 언어처리 기술을 활용함으로써 이 과정 또한 발전의 여지가 많다는 바를 시사한다. 따라서 본 연구는 먼저 CAPT 시스템 개발에 있어 발음 변이 양상과 언어학적 상관관계를 분석하였다. 외국인 화자들의 낭독체 변이 양상과 한국어 원어민 화자들의 낭독체 변이 양상을 대조하고 주요한 변이를 확인한 후, 상관관계 분석을 통하여 의사소통에 영향을 미치는 중요도를 파악하였다. 그 결과, 종성 삭제와 3중 대립의 혼동, 초분절 관련 오류가 발생할 경우 피드백 생성에 우선적으로 반영하는 것이 필요하다는 것이 확인되었다. 교정된 피드백을 자동으로 생성하는 것은 CAPT 시스템의 중요한 과제 중 하나이다. 본 연구는 이 과제가 발화의 스타일 변화의 문제로 해석이 가능하다고 보았으며, 생성적 적대 신경망 (Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Network; CycleGAN) 구조에서 모델링하는 것을 제안하였다. GAN 네트워크의 생성모델은 비원어민 발화의 분포와 원어민 발화 분포의 매핑을 학습하며, Cycle consistency 손실함수를 사용함으로써 발화간 전반적인 구조를 유지함과 동시에 과도한 교정을 방지하였다. 별도의 특징 추출 과정이 없이 필요한 특징들이 CycleGAN 프레임워크에서 무감독 방법으로 스스로 학습되는 방법으로, 언어 확장이 용이한 방법이다. 언어학적 분석에서 드러난 주요한 변이들 간의 우선순위는 Auxiliary Classifier CycleGAN 구조에서 모델링하는 것을 제안하였다. 이 방법은 기존의 CycleGAN에 지식을 접목시켜 피드백 음성을 생성함과 동시에 해당 피드백이 어떤 유형의 오류인지 분류하는 문제를 수행한다. 이는 도메인 지식이 교정 피드백 생성 단계까지 유지되고 통제가 가능하다는 장점이 있다는 데에 그 의의가 있다. 본 연구에서 제안한 방법을 평가하기 위해서 27개의 모국어를 갖는 217명의 유의미 어휘 발화 65,100개로 피드백 자동 생성 모델을 훈련하고, 개선 여부 및 정도에 대한 지각 평가를 수행하였다. 제안된 방법을 사용하였을 때 학습자 본인의 목소리를 유지한 채 교정된 발음으로 변환하는 것이 가능하며, 전통적인 방법인 음높이 동기식 중첩가산 (Pitch-Synchronous Overlap-and-Add) 알고리즘을 사용하는 방법에 비해 상대 개선률 16.67%이 확인되었다.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Motivation 1 1.1.1. An Overview of CAPT Systems 3 1.1.2. Survey of existing Korean CAPT Systems 5 1.2. Problem Statement 7 1.3. Thesis Structure 7 Chapter 2. Pronunciation Analysis of Korean Produced by Chinese 9 2.1. Comparison between Korean and Chinese 11 2.1.1. Phonetic and Syllable Structure Comparisons 11 2.1.2. Phonological Comparisons 14 2.2. Related Works 16 2.3. Proposed Analysis Method 19 2.3.1. Corpus 19 2.3.2. Transcribers and Agreement Rates 22 2.4. Salient Pronunciation Variations 22 2.4.1. Segmental Variation Patterns 22 2.4.1.1. Discussions 25 2.4.2. Phonological Variation Patterns 26 2.4.1.2. Discussions 27 2.5. Summary 29 Chapter 3. Correlation Analysis of Pronunciation Variations and Human Evaluation 30 3.1. Related Works 31 3.1.1. Criteria used in L2 Speech 31 3.1.2. Criteria used in L2 Korean Speech 32 3.2. Proposed Human Evaluation Method 36 3.2.1. Reading Prompt Design 36 3.2.2. Evaluation Criteria Design 37 3.2.3. Raters and Agreement Rates 40 3.3. Linguistic Factors Affecting L2 Korean Accentedness 41 3.3.1. Pearsons Correlation Analysis 41 3.3.2. Discussions 42 3.3.3. Implications for Automatic Feedback Generation 44 3.4. Summary 45 Chapter 4. Corrective Feedback Generation for CAPT 46 4.1. Related Works 46 4.1.1. Prosody Transplantation 47 4.1.2. Recent Speech Conversion Methods 49 4.1.3. Evaluation of Corrective Feedback 50 4.2. Proposed Method: Corrective Feedback as a Style Transfer 51 4.2.1. Speech Analysis at Spectral Domain 53 4.2.2. Self-imitative Learning 55 4.2.3. An Analogy: CAPT System and GAN Architecture 57 4.3. Generative Adversarial Networks 59 4.3.1. Conditional GAN 61 4.3.2. CycleGAN 62 4.4. Experiment 63 4.4.1. Corpus 64 4.4.2. Baseline Implementation 65 4.4.3. Adversarial Training Implementation 65 4.4.4. Spectrogram-to-Spectrogram Training 66 4.5. Results and Evaluation 69 4.5.1. Spectrogram Generation Results 69 4.5.2. Perceptual Evaluation 70 4.5.3. Discussions 72 4.6. Summary 74 Chapter 5. Integration of Linguistic Knowledge in an Auxiliary Classifier CycleGAN for Feedback Generation 75 5.1. Linguistic Class Selection 75 5.2. Auxiliary Classifier CycleGAN Design 77 5.3. Experiment and Results 80 5.3.1. Corpus 80 5.3.2. Feature Annotations 81 5.3.3. Experiment Setup 81 5.3.4. Results 82 5.4. Summary 84 Chapter 6. Conclusion 86 6.1. Thesis Results 86 6.2. Thesis Contributions 88 6.3. Recommendations for Future Work 89 Bibliography 91 Appendix 107 Abstract in Korean 117 Acknowledgments 120Docto

The Acquisition of English stops by Saudi L2 Learners

Researchers have studied voice onset time (VOT) in a number of languages but there is a scarcity of research on the acquisition of VOT of English, particularly by adult Saudi learners, and on the VOT of Saudi Arabic. The current study aims to fill these gaps. At the same time, we aimed to assess whether key claims of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM) were supported by this kind of data. 31 adult advanced Saudi learners of English and 60 monolinguals (30 native English and 30 Arabic monolinguals) participated in this study. The VOTs of the voiced and voiceless stops were measured followed by three different vowels, in both isolated word and word in sentence contexts. The results show that the learners produced English voiceless stops with aspiration closer to Arabic than to the higher native English VOT values, and voiced stops with pre-voicing, similar to Arabic, rather than with native English short-lag VOT values. Context had an effect in English but vowel did not, while the reverse was true for the learners and Arabic native speakers. Overall, learners' acquisition was modest despite their level and exposure, in that they overwhelmingly resembled Arabic rather than English native speakers. Several hypotheses based on SLM expectations were not confirmed in an unqualified way. However, support was found for learners' phonetic categories being ‘deflected’ away from both L1 and L2 categories. All three groups produced longer positive VOT for aspirated than unaspirated or voiced plosives. All exhibited VOT increasing across places of articulation, front to back for the voiceless stops, but only English native speakers showed this clearly for the voiced stops. Length of residence in UK and daily use of English did not seem to affect nativelikeness of learner VOT

A conjecture of singing chinese in italian

This research intends to show how Chinese contemporary vocal works can be sung with the western lyrical singing technique, focusing on the pronunciation of the Italian language: The way of dealing with Chinese vowels and consonants in the pronunciation of articulation refers to the rules/principles of that presented in Italian language. The subject was inspired by Dr. A. Hirt’s lecture about singing English like Italians in 2011. In terms of rationality, to convey a sense yet also to approach the maximization of the rules of phonation (vowels) and articulation (consonants), researchers hypothesize that Chinese language (Mandarin) can be pronounced like the Italian language but in the setting of singing. This study will take into consideration from pieces of literature about singing technique to teaching, from viewpoints about articulation (in singing) of performers, to recordings and videos. We Believe it’s necessary to import(impart) knowledge about the singing of Chinese phonetics and linguistics, compared to Italian, the most traditional language for singing and the original language of a considerable number of masterpieces on what regards vocal repertoire,since they have been evolving from two completely families of languages

A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters

The effectiveness of shadowing technique through Disney films in consonant pronunciation

ENGLISH: One of the important aspects when speaking in English is the good and correct pronunciation. It is because one's pronunciation can affect the success of communicating. Even so, the difference in sound between English and Indonesian makes it difficult for students. To overcome this, the purpose of this research is to find out whether the use of shadowing techniques can help students improve their consonant pronunciation. The shadowing technique is a method of learning English pronunciation that requires students to shadow or imitate audio from native speakers of the target language, namely English. This research used a quantitative approach with a quasi-experimental design. The data that has been collected came from the pre-test and post-test of 35 8th grade students at SMPN 4 Sumenep, which were divided into experimental and control groups. A total of 70 recordings were obtained from these participants. To determine the effect of using the shadowing technique, the collected data were analyzed using the T-test. The results showed that the significance value on the T-test was 0.016 < 0.05. This means, there is a significant effect on students' consonant pronunciation. In addition, in the posttest it was found that students still had difficulty pronouncing consonants /ʒ/(70%), /p/(48%), /θ/(48%), /ð/(43%), /z/(35 %), /v/(30%), /r/(19%) (experimental group), and consonants /ʒ/(82%), /θ/(82%), /ð/(75%), /p/(55%), /v/(55%), /z/(43%), /k/(45%) (control group). Based on the results of the T test and the difference in the percentage between the two groups, it can be concluded that the use of shadowing techniques has a positive and significant effect on improving students' consonant pronunciation. INDONESIA: Salah satu aspek penting saat berbicara menggunakan bahasa Inggris adalah pengucapan yang baik dan benar. Hal ini dikarenakan pengucapan seseorang dapat berpengaruh dalam kesuksesan berkomunikasi. Meski begitu, adanya perbedaan bunyi antara Bahasa Inggris dan Bahasa Indonesia membuat siswa kesulitan. Untuk mengatasi hal tersebut, tujuan penelitian ini ialah untuk mengetahui apakah penggunaan teknik shadowing dapat membantu siswa dalam meningkatkan pengucapan konsonan mereka. Teknik shadowing merupakan metode pembelajaran pengucapan bahasa Inggris yang mengharuskan siswa untuk "membayangi" atau meniru sebuah audio dari penutur bahasa target, yaitu bahasa Inggris. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif dengan desain quasi-eksperimen. Data yang telah dikumpulkan berasal dari pre-test dan post-test 35 siswa kelas 8 di SMPN 4 Sumenep yang terbagi dalam kelompok eksperimen dan kontrol. Didapatkan hasil sejumlah 70 rekaman yang berasal dari partisipan tersebut. Untuk menentukan efektifitas penggunaan teknik shadowing, data yang terkumpul dianalisis menggunakan uji T. Hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa nilai signifikansi pada uji T-test ialah 0.016<0.05. Hal ini bermakna, terdapat pengaruh signifikan terhadap pengucapan konsonan siswa. Selain itu, pada posttest ditemukan bahwa siswa masih kesulitan saat mengucapkan konsonan /ʒ/(70%), /p/(48%), /θ/(48%), /ð/(43%), /z/(35%), /v/(30%), /r/(19%) (kelompok eksperimen), dan konsonan /ʒ/(82%), /θ/(82%), /ð/(75%), /p/(55%), /v/(55%), /z/(43%), /k/(45%) (kelompok control). Berdasarkan hasil uji T dan perbedaan prosentase antara kedua kelompok tersebut, dapat disimpulkan bahwa penggunaan teknik shadowing memiki pengaruh positif dan signifikan dalam meningkatkan pengucapan konsonan siswa. ARABIC: أحد الجوانب المهمة عند التحدث باللغة الإنجليزية هو النطق الجيد والصحيح. هذا لأن نطق الشخص يمكن أن يؤثر على نجاح التواصل . رغم ذلك، الاختلاف في الصوت بين اللغة الإنجليزية والإندونيسية يجعل الأمر صعبًا على الطلاب. للتنمية على هذا ، فإن الغرض من هذه الدراسة هو معرفة ما إذا كان استخدام تقنيات الظل يمكن أن يساعد الطلاب على تحسين نطق الحروف الساكنة. تقنية الظل هي طريقة لتعلم نطق اللغة الإنجليزية تتطلب من الطلاب تظليل أو تقليد صوت من المتحدثين باللغة الهدف، وهي اللغة الإنجليزية. تستخدم هذه البحث نهجًا كميًا بتصميم شبه تجريبي. البيانات التي تم جمعها جاءت من الاختبار القبلي والبعدي لخمسة و ثلاثين طالبًا في الفصل الثامن في مدرسة المتوسطة الحكومية سومانب والتي تم تقسيمها إلى مجموعات تجريبية وضابطة. تم الحصول على ما مجموعه ٧٠ تسجيلات من هؤلاء المشاركين. لتحديد تأثير استخدام تقنية التظليل ، تم تحليل البيانات التي تم جمعها باستخدام اختبار ت. أظهرت النتائج أن قيمة المعنوية في اختبار " ت" كانت ٠٫٠١٦ < ٠٫٠٥. هذا يعني أن هناك تأثير كبير على نطق الحروف الساكنة لدى الطلاب. بالإضافة إلى ذلك ، وجد في الاختبار البعدي أن الطلاب ما زالوا يواجهون صعوبة في نطق الحرف الساكن / /(٧٠٪)، /p/(٤٨٪)، / /(٤٨٪)، / / (٤٣٪), /z/(٣٥٪)، /v/(٣٠٪)، /r/(١٩٪) (مجموعة تجريبية), والحروف / /(٨٢٪)، / /(٨٢٪)، //(٧٥٪)، /p/ (٥٥٪)٫ /v/ (٥٥٪)٫ /z/(٤٣٪)، /k/(٤٥٪) (مجموعة التحكم). بناءً على نتائج اختبار "ت" والاختلاف في النسبة المئوية بين المجموعتين ، يمكن الاستنتاج أن استخدام تقنيات الظل له تأثير إيجابي وهام على تحسين النطق الساكن لدى الطلاب

The phonological development of typically developing first language Zulu-speaking children aged 2;6 - 6;5 years : a descriptive cross-sectional study

Background: Zulu, one of the eleven official languages in South Africa, is the most spoken language in the country. However, research on children's phonological development in Zulu is minimal. To date there are no published Zulu speech assessments and associated normative data that speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can use to identify children with speech sound disorders who speak this language. Method: This descriptive, cross-sectional study aimed to document the phonological development of thirty-two typically developing first language Zulu-speaking children between 2;6 and 6;5 years. Participants attended school or crèche in Manguzi, KwaZulu-Natal, and were grouped into six month age categories. A single-word Zulu phonology assessment was developed and used to assess the participants. Assessments were audio recorded, and field transcriptions made using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Speech development was described in terms of phoneme acquisition, word shape, phonological processes and percentage of vowels (PVC) / consonants correct (PCC). Consonant acquisition was assessed in the penultimate syllable only, according to the structure of Zulu

Training Strategies for Improving Listeners’ Comprehension of Foreign-Accented Speech

This dissertation examines training methodology for improving native English speakers’ comprehension of foreign-accented speech. The training tasks, imitating and paraphrasing accented speech, were developed out of theoretical considerations about bottom-up and top-down processes in speech perception. Paraphrasing speech encourages a focus on the meaning and leads to practice of top-down processing, whereas imitating speech promotes attention to the accented pronunciation and allows practice of bottom-up processing. Additionally, the tasks support active, implicit learning. Results show an improvement in the comprehension of accented speech after about an hour of training. The imitation task primarily improves understanding of relatively short, decontextualized utterances with few semantic and syntactic cues, which suggests that attention to accented pronunciation helps with perception of discrete segments of speech. In contrast, the paraphrase task tends to improve perception of longer speech samples, implying that attention to meaning may be more beneficial for comprehension of conversational speech. There is evidence that training is durable and transferable, but the exact nature of its durability and transferability needs to be explored in future experiments