2,640 research outputs found
Acoustic Correlates of Word Stress as A Cue to Accent Strength
Due to the clear interference of their mother tongue prosody, many Czech learners produce their English with a conspicuous foreign accent. The goal of the present study is to investigate the acoustic cues that differentiate stressed and unstressed syllabic nuclei and identify individual details concerning their contribution to the specific sound of Czech English. Speech production of sixteen female non-professional Czech and British speakers was analysed with the sounds segmented on a word and phone level and with both canonical and actual stress positions manually marked. Prior to analyses the strength of the foreign accent was assessed in a perception test. Subsequently, stressed and unstressed vowels were measured with respect to their duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency and spectral slope. Our results show that, in general, Czech speakers use much less acoustic marking of stress than the British subjects. The difference is most prominent in the domains of fundamental frequency and amplitude. The Czech speakers also deviate from the canonical placement of stress, shifting it frequently to the first syllable. On the other hand, they seem to approximate the needed durational difference quite successfully. These outcomes support the concept of language interference since they correspond with the existing linguistic knowledge about Czech and English word stress. The study adds specific details concerning the extent of this interference in four acoustic dimensions
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Foreign accent syndrome as a developmental motor speech disorder
Introduction: Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a relatively rare motor speech disorder in which the pronunciation of a patient is perceived by listeners of the same language community as distinctly foreign. FAS has been well documented in adult patients with etiologically heterogeneous, though mostly vascular brain lesions affecting the motor speech network of the language dominant hemisphere. In addition, reports exist of adult patients in whom FAS was due to a psychiatric illness. Although FAS has been reported in children, such accounts are rare and have remained largely anecdotal in that there have been no formally documented cases of FAS as a developmental motor speech disorder.
Methods and results: For the first time, we describe the clinical, cognitive and neurolinguistic findings in two patients who in the absence of a history of psychiatric illness or acquired brain damage already presented with FAS at an early stage of speech and language development. In the first patient “developmental FAS” was associated with a dysharmonic distribution of neurocognitive test results indicating slight underdevelopment of visuo-spatial skills and visual memory. The second patient presented with “developmental FAS” associated with specific language impairment (SLI). Independent support for a diagnosis of FAS in both patients was obtained in an accent attribution experiment in which groups of native speakers of (Belgian) Dutch assessed the type of foreign accent of a sample of the patients’ conversational speech. Both patients were judged as non-native speakers of Dutch by the majority of participants who predominantly identified the accent as French.
Conclusion: This paper for the first time documents two patients who presented with FAS on a developmental basis. The finding that FAS does not only occur in the context of acquired brain damage or psychogenic illness but also exists as developmental motor speech impairment requires a re-definition of FAS as a clinical syndrome
Production and perception of speaker-specific phonetic detail at word boundaries
Experiments show that learning about familiar voices affects speech processing in many tasks. However, most studies focus on isolated phonemes or words and do not explore which phonetic properties are learned about or retained in memory. This work investigated inter-speaker phonetic variation involving word boundaries, and its perceptual consequences. A production experiment found significant variation in the extent to which speakers used a number of acoustic properties to distinguish junctural minimal pairs e.g. 'So he diced them'—'So he'd iced them'. A perception experiment then tested intelligibility in noise of the junctural minimal pairs before and after familiarisation with a particular voice. Subjects who heard the same voice during testing as during the familiarisation period showed significantly more improvement in identification of words and syllable constituents around word boundaries than those who heard different voices. These data support the view that perceptual learning about the particular pronunciations associated with individual speakers helps listeners to identify syllabic structure and the location of word boundaries
RUSSIAN ACCENT IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE AFFECTS THE PERCEPTION OF VOICE PLEASANTNESS BY BRAZILIANS
The field of foreign accents in Brazilian Portuguese is very poorly explored mainly in relation to perceptual impressions caused on listeners by foreign accents. The objective of this paper is to conduct a perceptual experiment to analyze the perception of voice pleasantness in relation to degrees of foreign accent. Our focus is on Russian accented Brazilian Portuguese. Despite the representativeness of the Russian community in Brazil, there are hardly any studies on Russian accented speech. To evaluate the perception of voice pleasantness in relation to the Russian accented speech, we have selected, from our database, speech samples in Brazilian Portuguese from 12 native Russian speakers and six Brazilians, all of them residing in São Paulo. The speech samples were incorporated into an online questionnaire. The analysis of the 129 answers given by the native Brazilian Portuguese speakers showed a strong negative correlation between the degree of Russian accent in Brazilian Portuguese and the degree of voice pleasantness. Experience of interaction with foreigners or knowledge of foreign languages, including Russian, did not influence the result. We conclude that higher degrees of Russian accented speech in Brazilian Portuguese affect the perception of speakers´ characteristics by Brazilians in a negative way
The phonological functions of segmental and subsegmental duration
The paper discusses the role segmental and subsegmental duration in the organization of a sound system in English and Polish. It analyses how duration contributes to signaling phonological phenomena such as voicing, words stress and word boundary. Special emphasis is put on cross-linguistic differences between English and Polish and how those differences emerge in the process of learning English by speakers of Polish
Dutch Word Stress as Pronounced by Indonesian Students
This study focuses on the way in which the Dutch monophthongal vowels are pronounced by Indonesian students. To investigate whether Indonesian students realize the Dutch vowels correctly, especially when they are stressed, I analysed duration and quality of stressed and unstressed Dutch vowels. Measurements were done on the duration and the formant frequencies of the vowels spoken by Indonesian students and by native speakers of Dutch as well. Statistical analysis showed that in general the differences in duration between vowels spoken by the Indonesian students and by the native speakers were not significant. However, the effect of stress on the lengthening of the vowels was stronger for the Indonesian students than for the native speakers. In addition, statistical analysis of the formant frequencies confirmed that the non-native speakers realized the Dutch vowels slightly differently from the Dutch native speakers. The Indonesian students pronounced the stressed vowels more clearly than their unstressed counterparts; yet their vowel diagram is smaller than the vowel diagram of the native speakers
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Intrinsic vowel F0, the size of vowel inventories and second language acquisition
The phenomenon of intrinsic vowel F0 (IF0), in which high vowels exhibit higher F0 than low vowels, has been widely attested in languages of the world. Most often, IF0 is regarded as an automatic, physiologically determined phenomenon, whereas some claim that IF0 is a controlled feature, introduced to enhance vowel contrasts. This paper presents new evidence on this issue by means of a cross-linguistic investigation of the influence of vowel inventory size on IF0 and a study of IF0 in second language (L2) acquisition. IF0 was measured in three language varieties: Arabic (a language with 3 vowels), Dutch (a 12-vowel system), and Dutch spoken by native Arabic-speaking learners. IF0 was significantly larger in Dutch than Arabic, but did not differ significantly between Arabic and Dutch produced by L2 learners. No spectral differences between the corresponding vowels of the three language varieties were found. While confirming the universality of IF0, these results also suggest that the size of IF0 may be language-specific, depending on the need to enhance vowel contrasts. Thus, these results agree well with a mixed physiological-enhancement account, which assumes that IF0 is physiologically determined, but also at least in part the effect of an interacting, controlled mechanism
Was That a Bag or a Bug? Perceptual Measures, Euclidean Distance, Mahalanobis Distance, and Pillai Scores in the Assessment of L2 Pronunciation
Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Llengües i Literatures Modernes i d'Estudis Anglesos, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2020-2021. Tutor: Joan C. Mora[eng] Researchers employ a variety of techniques to measure accuracy of second-language pronunciation. Little research has been done on certain measures that have been used more in recent studies, such as Mahalanobis distance and Pillai scores, and how they compare to perceptual measures. Using pre- and post-test recordings of 23 Spanish/ Catalan learners of English that were obtained using a delayed word repetition task in a previous, high-variability phonetic training study on the English phonemes /æ/ and /ᴧ/, this thesis examines the relationship between native-speaking judges’ word identification and goodness ratings, Euclidean distances, Mahalanobis distances, and Pillai scores in their evaluation of pronunciation accuracy and improvement between test times. For each acoustic metric, measures between native- and non-native speakers’ productions are taken as well as measures between non-native speakers’ realizations of /æ/ and /ᴧ/. An experimental way of computing perceptual ratings for items that are incorrectly identified by raters is also investigated and compared to existing measures
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