Distal Demonstrative Hitlo in Taiwanese Southern Min

PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200

Reactions to second language speech: Influences of discrete speech characteristics, rater experience, and speaker first language background

This study investigates how Mandarin and Slavic language speakers’ comprehensibility, accentedness, and fluency ratings, as assigned by experienced teacher-raters and novice raters, align with discrete linguistic measures, and raters’ accounts of influences on their scoring. In addition to examining mean ratings in relation to rater experience and speaker first language background, we correlated ratings with segmental, prosodic, and temporal measures. Introspective reports were segmented, coded, enumerated, and submitted to loglinear analysis to elucidate influences on ratings. Results showed that ratings were strongly correlated with prosodic goodness and moderately correlated with segmental errors, implying the importance of both segmentals and prosody in L2 speech ratings. Experienced teacher-raters provided lengthier reports than novice raters, producing more comments for all coded categories where an error was identified except for pausing (a dysfluency marker). This may be because novice raters observed little else about the speech or struggled to pinpoint or articulate other features

Should we use movie subtitles to study linguistic patterns of conversational speech? A study based on French, English and Taiwan Mandarin

International audienceLinguistic research benefits from the wide range of resources and software tools developed for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, NLP has a strong historical bias towards written language, thereby making these resources and tools often inadequate to address research questions related to the linguistic patterns of spontaneous speech. In this preliminary study, we investigate whether corpora of movie and TV subtitles can be employed to estimate data-driven NLP models adapted to conversational speech. In particular, the presented work explore lexical and syntactic distributional aspects across three genres (conversational, written and subtitles) and three languages (French, English and Taiwan Mandarin). Ongoing work focuses on comparing these three genres on the basis of deeper syntactic conversational patterns , using graph-based modelling and visualisation

Predicting L2 fluency from L1 fluency behaviour: the case of L1 Turkish and L2 English speakers

The article reports on the findings of a study investigating the relationship between first language (L1) and second language (L2) fluency behaviour. Drawing on data collected from Turkish learners of English, the study also addresses the question of whether proficiency level mediates the relationship, if any. The data were coded for a range of breakdown, repair, speed and composite measures. Language proficiency was measured by means of two tests: Oxford Placement Test and an Elicited Imitation Task. The results show that some breakdown and repair measures were positively correlated in L1 and L2, but no correlations were observed for articulation rate and speech rate. The relationships were not mediated by proficiency level. Regression analyses show that a number of models predicted L2 fluency. L1 fluency contributed significantly to models predicting pausing behaviour; EIT scores predicted L2 speech rate; and L1 fluency and OPT scores predicted L2 reformulation and end-clause pauses. The important implications of the findings for fluency research and second language pedagogy are discussed

Mandarin Chinese as a Second Language: A Review of Literature

Mandarin Chinese has become increasing prevalent in the modern world. Accordingly, research of Chinese as a second language has developed greatly over the past few decades. This paper reviews research on the difficulties of acquiring a second language in general and research that specifically details the difficulty of acquiring Chinese as a second language. Based on this research, the author also reveals some areas that should be researched further in order to advance the field

Naming and discourse production : a bilingual anomic case study

Though numerous studies have reported language recovery patterns in bilingual speakers with aphasia in Indo-European languages, studies of bilingual Chinese speaker with aphasia are not found. This paper presents a Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual speaker with aphasia and compares his performance in each dialect by examining both lexical retrieval and discourse production. Contrary to the expectations that he would perform differently in both dialects, results suggested that asymmetries in performance may be less likely found among structurally similar languages. Results also revealed word class effects in the absence of language effects in object and action naming. Further investigation on pattern of recovery in different modalities of structurally similar languages would contribute to studies of recovery pattern in bilingual Chinese speakers with aphasia.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Towards the automatic processing of Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan): developing a 'light' acoustic model of the target language and testing 'heavyweight' models from five national languages

International audienceAutomatic speech processing technologies hold great potential to facilitate the urgent task of documenting the world's languages. The present research aims to explore the application of speech recognition tools to a little-documented language, with a view to facilitating processes of annotation, transcription and linguistic analysis. The target language is Yongning Na (a.k.a. Mosuo), an unwritten Sino-Tibetan language with less than 50,000 speakers. An acoustic model of Na was built using CMU Sphinx. In addition to this 'light' model, trained on a small data set (only 4 hours of speech from 1 speaker), 'heavyweight' models from five national languages (English, French, Chinese, Vietnamese and Khmer) were also applied to the same data. Preliminary results are reported, and perspectives for the long road ahead are outlined