Preliminary Study of Validating Vocabulary Selection and Organization of A Manual Communication Board in Malay.

An integral component of a language-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system is providing vocabulary typical of fluent native language speakers. In the absence of reliable and valid research on Malay vocabulary for AAC, this descriptive study explored the validation process of vocabulary selection and organization for a 144-location manual communication board. An hour of aided language samples (talking while pointing to a prototype display) followed by self-administered surveys were gathered from four typical native Malay speakers (n=4), aged between 22 to 36 years at the University of Pittsburgh. Vocabulary frequency analysis, word commonality, and overall perceptions and feedback on the prototype display were compiled and analyzed. A total of 1112 word tokens and 454 word types were analyzed to support preliminary validation of the selected vocabulary and word organization of the prototype. Approximately 40% of the words on the display were used during the interview and the top 20 words were reported. Findings also suggest the importance of morphology and syntax considerations at early design stages. The positive overall perception of the display including vocabulary selection, the cultural and ethnicity appropriateness, and suggestions for system improvement were confirmed by the usability survey. Minimal rearrangement of the icon display needs to be performed to improve the usability of the system. Thus, the study findings support the early Malay manual communication board for AAC intervention. However, the limitation of the sample size and additional research is required to support a final display that optimizes vocabulary and morphosyntactic organization of a manual communication board in Malay

Development of Bisyllabic Speech Audiometry Word Lists for Adult Malay Speakers

Standardised speech audiometry material is essential in assessing hearing for speech; however, material in Malay language, particularly for speech reception threshold test, is limited and not thoroughly validated. This thesis examines the development of standardised, phonemically-balanced bisyllabic Malay speech reception threshold (SRT) test word lists for Malay-speaking adults. The effect of having a mixture of familiar and nonsense words on speech recognition is also explored. The processes of developing the word lists include selecting and compiling the words using content analysis research method, testing for homogeneity and consistency and validating the acoustic content, both using correlational research method, and assessing the clinical validity using concurrent validity method. The familiar words were selected from a corpus of familiar words extracted from daily newspapers while the nonsense words were formed based on linguistic properties of Malay. The preliminary set consisted of fifteen lists with 10 familiar words and 5 nonsense words in each. The analyses of the findings show consistency of speech discrimination using the word lists using Friedman test to have statistically no significant difference in correct scores achieved using any of the word lists, Χ2 = 19.584, p>0.05. Homogeneity test for all lists using Cronbach’s alpha showed a value of 0.78, indicating a strong agreement and good homogeneity among the lists. When five lists with inter-item correlation ≤0.8 were excluded from the homogeneity analysis, the alpha value for the remaining 10 lists increased to 0.88. Consistency analysis of acoustic content using repeated measures ANOVA showed no significant difference between the list and the LTASS, F=1.229, p>0.05. All 15 lists were then tested for clinical validity. Two versions of list content were assessed, an all-words version (AWL) containing all 15 words each list, and a meaningful-words only version (MWL) containing 10 meaningful words for each list. Correlation analyses between half peak level (HPL) of the speech recognition curve and pure tone (PT) thresholds showed that, in consideration of both normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners, the HPL correlated best with PT average of 250, 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz for both AWL (r = 0.67 to 0.95) and MWL (r = 0.65 to 0.95). A comparison between HPL and PT average of 250, 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz showed mean differences of 4 dB (SD = 3) and 3 dB (SD = 4) with the range of tolerance (95% confidence) of ±7 dB and ±8 dB for AWL and MWL respectively. Sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values, when set at tolerance level of ±10 dB, were mostly >0.90 for normal hearing and hearing loss listeners using either versions. It was concluded that the addition of nonsense words does not significantly affect SRT. The correlation between the SRT obtained using the bisyllabic Malay word lists and the PT thresholds suggested that the word lists were robust enough to be used in assessing speech hearing clinically. In conclusion, the current study has achieved to develop and produce a standardised, phonemically balanced bisyllabic Malay speech audiometry (BMSA) word lists for assessing speech reception threshold and discrimination in adult Malay speakers

Investigating spoken emotion : the interplay of language and facial expression

This thesis aims to investigate how spoken expressions of emotions are influenced by the characteristics of spoken language and the facial emotion expression. The first three chapters examined how production and perception of emotions differed between Cantonese (tone language) and English (non-tone language). The rationale for this contrast was that the acoustic property of Fundamental Frequency (F0) may be used differently in the production and perception of spoken expressions in tone languages as F0 may be preserved as a linguistic resource for the production of lexical tones. To test this idea, I first developed the Cantonese Audio-visual Emotional Speech (CAVES) database, which was then used as stimuli in all the studies presented in this thesis (Chapter 1). An emotion perception study was then conducted to examine how three groups of participants (Australian English, Malaysian Malay and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers) identified spoken expression of emotions that were produced in either English or Cantonese (Chapter 2). As one of the aims of this study was to disambiguate the effects of language from culture, these participants were selected on the basis that they either shared similarities in language type (non-tone language, Malay and English) or culture (collectivist culture, Cantonese and Malay). The results showed that a greater similarity in emotion perception was observed between those who spoke a similar type of language, as opposed to those who shared a similar culture. This suggests some intergroup differences in emotion perception may be attributable to cross-language differences. Following up on these findings, an acoustic analysis study (Chapter 3) showed that compared to English spoken expression of emotions, Cantonese expressions had less F0 related cues (median and flatter F0 contour) and also the use of F0 cues was different. Taken together, these results show that language characteristics (n F0 usage) interact with the production and perception of spoken expression of emotions. The expression of disgust was used to investigate how facial expressions of emotions affect speech articulation. The rationale for selecting disgust was that the facial expression of disgust involves changes to the mouth region such as closure and retraction of the lips, and these changes are likely to have an impact on speech articulation. To test this idea, an automatic lip segmentation and measurement algorithm was developed to quantify the configuration of the lips from images (Chapter 5). By comparing neutral to disgust expressive speech, the results showed that disgust expressive speech is produced with significantly smaller vertical mouth opening, greater horizontal mouth opening and lower first and second formant frequencies (F1 and F2). Overall, this thesis provides an insight into how aspects of expressive speech may be shaped by specific (language type) and universal (face emotion expression) factors

Postlexical prosody and the prosody-syntax interface

Synopsis: This book is an investigation into aspects of prosody, intonation and the prosody-syntax interface in Totoli, an endangered Austronesian language. With a strongly data-driven approach, the study integrates a combination of experimental evidence from both production and perception with corpus-based evidence through descriptive and inferential statistics. The study takes the prime structuring unit of speech – the Intonation Unit – as its principal unit of investigation. It presents a thorough description of the IU, develops an intonational model of it, and investigates the syntactic units it contains. The author argues that the data is best analysed by assuming recursive embedding of Intonation Units into Compound Intonation Units. This research represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the nature of prosodic systems found in the languages of the region and in intonational systems in general. It is one of the few investigations into the intonation of Austronesian languages and its analytical proposals are relevant both to prosodic theory and to phonological typology

Arabic Dialect Texts Classification

This study investigates how to classify Arabic dialects in text by extracting features which show the differences between dialects. There has been a lack of research about classification of Arabic dialect texts, in comparison to English and some other languages, due to the lack of Arabic dialect text corpora in comparison with what is available for dialects of English and some other languages. What is more, there is an increasing use of Arabic dialects in social media, so this text is now considered quite appropriate as a medium of communication and as a source of a corpus. We collected tweets from Twitter, comments from Facebook and online newspapers from five groups of Arabic dialects: Gulf, Iraqi, Egyptian, Levantine, and North African. The research sought to: 1) create a dataset of Arabic dialect texts to use in training and testing the system of classification, 2) find appropriate features to classify Arabic dialects: lexical (word and multi-word-unit) and grammatical variation across dialects, 3) build a more sophisticated filter to extract features from Arabic-character written dialect text files. In this thesis, the first part describes the research motivation to show the reason for choosing the Arabic dialects as a research topic. The second part presents some background information about the Arabic language and its dialects, and the literature review shows previous research about this subject. The research methodology part shows the initial experiment to classify Arabic dialects. The results of this experiment showed the need to create an Arabic dialect text corpus, by exploring Twitter and online newspaper. The corpus used to train the ensemble classifier and to improve the accuracy of classification the corpus was extended by collecting tweets from Twitter based on the spatial coordinate points and comments from Facebook posts. The corpus was annotated with dialect labels and used in automatic dialect classification experiments. The last part of this thesis presents the results of classification, conclusions and future work

Malaysian learners’ argumentative writing in English: A contrastive, corpus-driven study

Research on learner English is by now an established sub-discipline in corpus linguistics, yet few studies exist on Malaysian learners. This thesis explores the difficulties that Malaysian learners of English face when producing argumentative essays, focussing on their overuse of particular linguistic features. WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012) is used to analyse and compare two corpora: The Malaysian Corpus of Students’ Argumentative Writing (MCSAW): Version 2, consisting of 1,460 Malaysian students’ argumentative essays; and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), which is a corpus of native English essays written by British and American students and is used as a reference language variety here. The software enables analysis of keywords (words that are over-used in MCSCAW), collocates or surrounding words of the keywords, and concordances, which are used to examine the keywords in context. Crucially, it also allows examination of the ‘range’ of linguistic features (i.e. by how many students a feature is employed) – an under-used but crucial affordance of this software programme that is exploited in this thesis for down-sampling purposes. The thesis combines quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic techniques, with keywords providing the starting point for in-depth qualitative analysis using concordancing. This corpus-driven analysis of MCSAW identifies typical features of the writing style of Malaysian learners’ writing of English, particularly the overuse of can and we (including the highly frequent bundle we can), and the lack of discourse-organising markers. Analysis of key words and key bundles is complemented with collocation analysis and concordancing of the highly frequent modal verb can as well as the highly frequent first person plural pronoun we, which both have a high range across the corpus. The concordances are carefully and systematically examined to explore the ways in which these over-used linguistic items are actually employed in their co-text by the Malaysian writers. While results show some similarities in both learner corpus and reference language variety, Malaysian learners tend to demonstrate higher writer visibility overall. One possible explanation lies in the influence of the national language (Malay). The thesis also identifies repeated sentences that occur in more than one essay, which implies either plagiarism on the learners’ part or a particular teaching strategy (templates or phrases that are provided to students). This finding has significant implications for corpus design (in terms of the need for more topic variation) as well as methodological significance (in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of using the ‘range’ feature for down-sampling), which are also discussed in this thesis. In sum, this thesis makes a new contribution to corpus linguistic research on learner English and will have implications for the development of teaching practices for Malaysian learners of English

The production and perception of peripheral geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Arabic

Gemination is typologically common word-medially but is rare at the periphery of the word (word-initially and -finally). In line with this observation, prior research on production and perception of gemination has focused primarily on medial gemination. Much less is known about the production and perception of peripheral gemination. This PhD thesis reports on comprehensive articulatory, acoustic and perceptual investigations of geminate-singleton contrasts according to the position of the contrast in the word and in the utterance. The production component of the project investigated the articulatory and acoustic features of medial and peripheral gemination of voiced and voiceless coronal stops in Modern standard Arabic and regional Arabic vernacular dialects, as produced by speakers from two disparate and geographically distant countries, Morocco and Lebanon. The perceptual experiment investigated how standard and dialectal Arabic gemination contrasts in each word position were categorised and discriminated by three groups of non-native listeners, each differing in their native language experience with gemination at different word positions. The first experiment used ultrasound and acoustic recordings to address the extent to which word-initial gemination in Moroccan and Lebanese dialectal Arabic is maintained, as well as the articulatory and acoustic variability of the contrast according to the position of the gemination contrast in the utterance (initial vs. medial) and between the two dialects. The second experiment compared the production of word-medial and -final gemination in Modern Standard Arabic as produced by Moroccan and Lebanese speakers. The aim of the perceptual experiment was to disentangle the contribution of phonological and phonetic effects of the listeners’ native languages on the categorisation and discrimination of non-lexical Moroccan gemination by three groups of non-native listeners varying in their phonological (native Lebanese group and heritage Lebanese group, for whom Moroccan is unintelligible, i.e., non-native language) and phonetic-only (native English group) experience with gemination across the three word positions. The findings in this thesis constitute important contributions about positional and dialectal effects on the production and perception of gemination contrasts, going beyond medial gemination (which was mainly included as control) and illuminating in particular the typologically rare peripheral gemination

Improving speaking performance and L2 motivation through task-based language teaching on Malaysian undergraduate students

The present study investigated the effect of two different language teaching methods (TBLT and TSLT) on students’ speaking performance and motivation towards learning and speaking English. The study employed a mixed-method, quasi-experimental, pre-/post-test design. The participants were 59 English as a second language (ESL) undergraduate students (aged 20 to 23), who were assigned to two intact groups namely the EIST (explicit instruction + speaking tasks, i.e. TSLT) group and the ST (speaking tasks only, i.e. TBLT) group. The instruments utilised within this study involved both quantitative and qualitative methods. Students’ speaking performance was assessed through a speaking test whereas their motivation towards learning and speaking English was elicited through a questionnaire and interview. These instruments were implemented at the pre- and post-test data collection points before and after the speaking intervention which lasted for 8 weeks. For the data analyses, eleven measures of speaking and five sub-scales for motivation were employed to assess students’ speaking performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency) and L2 motivation (attitude, integrativeness, instrumentality, linguistic self-confidence and learning situation), respectively. The findings of the study indicated that students in both groups had an approximately equal level of speaking performance and motivation at the pre-test. However, at post-test, the results showed that the two teaching methods had different impacts on students’ speaking performance and motivation. The TSLT method had a significant effect on the EIST group’s vocabulary (lexical complexity) outcomes whereby the language produced was more diverse than the ST group. However, experiencing the TBLT method, the ST group managed to produce more complex and sophisticated language with the presence of abstract words, even though overall levels of lexical complexity and productivity were lower. In addition, the ST group had become more fluent over time with a significant decrease in pauses, repetition and reformulation compared to the EIST group. Nevertheless, neither group demonstrated a statistically significant improvement across the measures of syntactic complexity and accuracy. As for motivation, the questionnaire data indicated that the two language teaching methods had no effect on students’ attitudes, integrativeness and instrumentality. However, TSLT had a positive impact on the EIST group’s linguistic self-confidence and learning situation motives, whereas TBLT had a positive effect on the ST group’s linguistic self-confidence only. Nevertheless, within the interview, analysed qualitatively, students in both groups showed positive views across all sub-scales of motivation. The study provides evidence that the two different language teaching methods affected students’ speaking performance and L2 motivation in different ways. These results imply that the TSLT approach had a positive impact on students’ overall vocabulary outcomes and L2 retention and the TBLT approach was more effective in promoting complex and fluent language. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of the teacher’s role and the TSLT approach in encouraging students’ overall L2 motivation