3,368 research outputs found
Monolingual and bilingual spanish-catalan speech recognizers developed from SpeechDat databases
Under the SpeechDat specifications, the Spanish member of SpeechDat consortium has recorded a Catalan database that includes one
thousand speakers. This communication describes some experimental work that has been carried out using both the Spanish and the
Catalan speech material.
A speech recognition system has been trained for the Spanish language using a selection of the phonetically balanced utterances from
the 4500 SpeechDat training sessions. Utterances with mispronounced or incomplete words and with intermittent noise were discarded.
A set of 26 allophones was selected to account for the Spanish sounds and clustered demiphones have been used as context dependent
sub-lexical units. Following the same methodology, a recognition system was trained from the Catalan SpeechDat database. Catalan
sounds were described with 32 allophones. Additionally, a bilingual recognition system was built for both the Spanish and Catalan
languages. By means of clustering techniques, the suitable set of allophones to cover simultaneously both languages was determined.
Thus, 33 allophones were selected. The training material was built by the whole Catalan training material and the Spanish material
coming from the Eastern region of Spain (the region where Catalan is spoken).
The performance of the Spanish, Catalan and bilingual systems were assessed under the same framework. The Spanish system exhibits
a significantly better performance than the rest of systems due to its better training. The bilingual system provides an equivalent
performance to that afforded by both language specific systems trained with the Eastern Spanish material or the Catalan SpeechDat
corpus.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are
in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the
information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR
system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We
currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the
performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation
of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still
problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new
terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition,
Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram.
Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient
coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English
dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word
basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For
the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words
unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the
target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and
show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods
improve the system performance
Acquiring a new second language contrast: an analysis of the English laryngeal system of native speakers of Dutch
This study examines the acquisition of the English laryngeal system by native speakers of (Belgian) Dutch. Both languages have a two-way laryngeal system, but while Dutch contrasts prevoiced with short-lag stops, English has a contrast between short-lag and long-lag stops. The primary aim of the article is to test two hypotheses on the acquisition process based on first language acquisition research: (1) native speakers of a voicing language will succeed in producing short-lag stops in the target aspirating language, since short-lag stops occur early in first language acquisition and can be considered unmarked and since one member of the contrast is formed by short-lag stops in both voicing and aspirating languages, and (2) native speakers of a voicing language will succeed in acquiring long-lag stops in the target language, because aspiration is an acoustically salient realization. The analysis is based on an examination of natural speech data (conversations between dyads of informants), combined with the results of a controlled reading task. Both types of data were gathered in Dutch as well as in Eng(Dutch) (i.e. the English speech of native speakers of Dutch). The analysis revealed an interesting pattern: while the first language (L1) Dutch speakers were successful in acquiring long-lag aspirated stops (confirming hypothesis 2), they did not acquire English short-lag stops (rejecting hypothesis 1). Instead of the target short-lag stops, the L1 Dutch speakers produced prevoiced stops and frequently transferred regressive voice assimilation with voiced stops as triggers from Dutch into English. Various explanations for this pattern in terms of acoustic salience, perceptual cues and training will be considered
Sentence-in-noise perception in Monolinguals and Multilinguals: The effect of contextual meaning, and linguistic and cognitive load.
This study proposes a framework by which grammatically and syntactically sound sentences are classified through the perceptual measurement in noise of multilinguals and monolinguals, using an objective measure called SPERI and an interpretivist measure called SPIn, with results evaluated using Shortlist models and the BLINCS model. Hereby filling a knowledge gap on the perception of sentences that combine in varying levels of contextual meaning, linguistic load and cognitive load, this study used sentence clustering methods to find limitations of the proposed framework in determining an absolute and accurate prediction of performance between sentences in the proposed different categories, with factors such as sentence predictability and word frequency taking precedence. There were unintended findings including a relationship between the number of languages spoken and performance, proficiency in other languages decreasing performance despite being an English Native, and how mistakes by multilinguals were more semantically and phonetically influenced than monolinguals
Contact-induced splits in Toronto Heritage Cantonese mid-vowels
This paper illustrates how contact can facilitate the development of phonemic and allophonic splits bypresenting results from a study of vowel variation and change in Toronto Cantonese, a variety of Cantonesespoken in a heritage language contact setting. The data includes hour-long sociolinguistic interviewsfrom speakers from two different generational backgrounds. The vowel space of each of 20speakers was created based on F1 and F2 measurements of 105 tokens per speaker (15 tokens for eachof 7 monophthongs). This paper focuses on the results for two of the mid vowels (/ɛ/ and /ɔ/) wherethere is evidence for the development of two phonetically conditioned splits based on velar context. Athird split, discussed in Tse (In Press), may have triggered the development of these two splits amongsecond-generation speakers. Phonological influence from Toronto English is one possible explanationfor these splits. Overall, the results of this study may partially address why there are more documentedcases of vowel mergers than vowel splits. Splits may be more likely to develop in certain contact settings that have been under-researched in the variationist sociolinguistics literature
Characteristics of Vietnamese lexis of Vietnamese Australian immigrants
The Vietnamese of Australian communities (VAC) still maintains many obsolete expressions originating from and related to the Southern Vietnamese political institutions of the pre-1975 Southern government. In addition, VAC has adopted English loanwords (ELs) through close contact with Australian English and uses them extensively to fill gaps in vocabulary. English loanwords have not only been borrowed in their original forms but were also nativized through the mechanism of loanwords and loan translation. Moreover, hybridised expressions have been coined by Vietnamese Australian émigrés through the compounding of one English or Vietnamese item with a Vietnamese or English item through loan blending
Phonetics vs. phonology in loanword adaptation: Revisiting the role of the bilingual
Following phonological and phonetic models of loanword adaptation, I present evidence from Burmese in favor of an intermediate model of loanword adaptation incorporating both language-independent phonetics and language-particular phonology. On the basis of a corpus of 200 loanword adaptations from English into Burmese, I first show that Burmese loanword adaptation involves a phonological scansion of phonemically relevant detail, as well as a phonetic scansion of phonemically irrelevant detail. These findings suggest that a model of loanword adaptation incorporating both phonetics and phonology is the most empirically sound. While loanword adaptations are indeed highly influenced by phonetic similarity, bilinguals play a leading role in adaptation, allowing the phonology of L2 to have a profound effect on adaptations in L1. The relative ranking of these phonetic and phonological considerations, then, appears to be a language-specific matter
Spectral and temporal implementation of Japanese speakers' English vowel categories : a corpus-based study
This study investigates the predictions of second language (L2) speech acquisition models — SLM(-r), PAM(-L2), and L2LP — on how native (L1) Japanese speakers implement the spectral and temporal aspects of L2 American English vowel categories. Data were obtained from 102 L1 Japanese speakers in the J-AESOP corpus, which also includes nativelikeness judgments by trained phoneticians. Spectrally, speakers judged to be non-nativelike showed a strong influence from L1 categories, except L2 /ʌ/ which could be deflected away from L1 /a/ according to SLM(-r) and L2 /ɑː/ which seemed orthographically assimilated to L1 /o/ according to PAM(-L2). More nativelike speakers showed vowel spectra similar to those of native English speakers across all vowels, in accordance with L2LP. Temporally, although speakers tended to equate the phonetic length of English vowels with Japanese phonemic length distinctions, segment-level L1-L2 category similarity was not a significant predictor of the speakers’ nativelikeness. Instead, the implementation of prosodic-level factors such as stress and phrase-final lengthening were better predictors. The results highlight the importance of suprasegmental factors in successful category learning and also reveal a weakness in current models of L2 speech acquisition, which focus primarily on the segmental level. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed
The acquisition of Sign Language: The impact of phonetic complexity on phonology
Research into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which nonword-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages — handshape and movement — affects the perception and articulation of signs. Ninety-one Deaf children aged 3–11 acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and 46 hearing nonsigners aged 6–11 repeated a set of 40 nonsense signs. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality
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