Sociofonetická studie dysfluentního chování u rodilých mluvčích angličtiny

Táto práca je zameraná na výskum vplyvu dvoch sociálnych faktorov, veku a pohlavia, na frekvenciu výskytu a variabilitu siedmich typov dysfluencií (vyplnené pauzy, tiché pauzy, opakovania, opravy, falošné začiatky, predlžovanie samohlások a predlžovanie spoluhlások) v spontánnej reči rodených hovoriacich angličtiny z Anglicka. Účastníci boli rozdelení do štyroch skupín podľa veku a pohlavia. Prvá časť práce ponúka všeobecnú charakteristiku všetkých siedmich typov dysfluencií spolu s hlavnými témami týkajúcich sa tvorby dysfluencií. Praktická časť prináša analýzu 32 nahrávok rodených hovoriacich angličtiny. Výsledky zameriavajúce sa na všeobecný vplyv veku a pohlavia ukazujú, že významný rozdiel sa nachádza jedine medzi vekovými skupinami, kde starší sú tí, ktorí produkujú viac dysfluencií. Pohlavie, na druhej strane, nespôsobuje žiadny významný rozdiel, s výnimkou predlžovania samohlások, kde rozdiel je významný, s výskytom vyšším u žien, a taktiež opakovanie, čo je jedinou dysfluenciou, kde je rozdiel významný u veku aj pohlavia, s výskytom vyšším u starších mužov. Kľúčové slová: dysfluencie, dysfluentné chovanie, sociofonetika, rodení hovoriaci angličtiny, frekvencia výskytu, variabilita, vek, pohlavieThe present thesis focuses on the study of the influence of two social factors, age and gender, on the frequency and variation of seven different types of dysfluencies (filled pauses, silent pauses, repairs, repetitions, false starts, vowel and consonant lengthening) in the spontaneous speech of native English speakers from England. The speakers were divided into four different social groups according to their age and gender. The first part of the present thesis provides a general characterization of the relevant types of dysfluencies, together with the main issues concerning the production of speech dysfluencies. The empirical part presents the analyses of the recordings of 32 native English speakers from England. The overall results considering general influence of age and gender show that the only significant difference is between age groups, with older speakers producing more dysfluencies than younger speakers. Gender, on the other hand, does not make the difference significant, except for vowel lengthenings that were produced significantly more by female speakers than male speakers, and repetitions, which is the only type of dysfluency where the difference is significant and influenced by both age and gender, with older male speakers producing significantly more dysfluencies than any other...Department of the English Language and ELT MethodologyÚstav anglického jazyka a didaktikyFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

A Research on the Use of Pause and Lengthening for Turn Organization in Chinese EFL Students’ Conversations

Pause and lengthening are used frequently for turn organization in English interactions. But, for Chinese EFL learners, these two prosodic mechanisms are not used efficiently. This study analyzed the use of pause and lengthening for turn organization in Chinese EFL learners’ English conversations. The results show the excessive dependence on the pause to show the turn yielding intentions in Chinese learners’ conversations, and Chinese learners probably cannot distinguish the uses of final lengthening within turns and the lengthening before turn changes

Prosodic Phrasing in Spontaneous Swedish

One of the most important functions of prosody is to divide the flow of speech into chunks. The chunking, or prosodic phrasing, of speech plays an important role in both the production and perception of speech. This study represents a move away from the laboratory speech examined in previous, related studies on prosodic phrasing in Swedish, since a spontaneous, Southern Swedish speech material is investigated. The study is, however, not primarily intended as a study of the Southern Swedish dialect; rather Southern Swedish is used as a convenient object on which to test various hypotheses about the phrasing function of prosody in spontaneous speech. The study comprises both analyses of production data and perception experiments, and both the phonetics and phonology of prosodic phrasing is dealt with. First, the distribution of prosodic phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech is examined by considering it as a reflection of optimality theoretic constraints that restrain the production and perception of speech. Secondly, the phonetic realization of prosodic phrase boundaries is investigated in a study on articulation rate changes within the prosodic phrase. Evidence of phrase-final lengthening, a reduction of the articulation rate in the final part of the prosodic phrase, is found. The tonal means used to signal coherence within the prosodic phrase is subsequently investigated. An attempt is made to test the two Lund intonation models’ capacities for describing spontaneous speech. The two approaches have different implications for the amount of preplanning needed, which makes them particularly interesting to compare by testing spontaneous data. The results indicate that no or little preplanning is needed to produce tonally coherent phrases. No evidence is found to suggest e.g. that speakers accommodate for the length of the upcoming phrase by starting longer phrases with a higher F0 than short phrases. An explanation is sought for variation in F0 starting points found in the data despite F0’s insensitivity to phrase length. It is concluded that F0 is used to signal coherence even across prosodic phrase boundaries. It is furthermore found that tonal coherence signals are used to override strong boundary signals in spontaneous speech, thereby making initially unplanned additions possible. Finally, the perception of boundary strength is examined in two perception experiments. Listeners are found to agree well in their perceptual judgments of boundary strength, and it is shown that the main correlate to perceived boundary strength in spontaneous speech is pause length. The useful distinction between weak, prosodic phrase boundaries and strong, prosodic utterance boundaries in descriptions of read speech is found to be inappropriate for descriptions of spontaneous speech. It fails to capture the conflicting local and global signals of boundary strength and coherence that arise when strong boundary signals are overriden by coherence signals. The possibility to use conflicting signals in this way is seen as an important asset to the speaker as it makes changes in the speech plan possible, and it is regarded to be a characteristic of prosodic phrasing in spontaneous speech

The phonetics of speech breathing : pauses, physiology, acoustics, and perception

Speech is made up of a continuous stream of speech sounds that is interrupted by pauses and breathing. As phoneticians are primarily interested in describing the segments of the speech stream, pauses and breathing are often neglected in phonetic studies, even though they are vital for speech. The present work adds to a more detailed view of both pausing and speech breathing with a special focus on the latter and the resulting breath noises, investigating their acoustic, physiological, and perceptual aspects. We present an overview of how a selection of corpora annotate pauses and pause-internal particles, as well as a recording setup that can be used for further studies on speech breathing. For pauses, this work emphasized their optionality and variability under different tempos, as well as the temporal composition of silence and breath noise in breath pauses. For breath noises, we first focused on acoustic and physiological characteristics: We explored alignment between the onsets and offsets of audible breath noises with the start and end of expansion of both rib cage and abdomen. Further, we found similarities between speech breath noises and aspiration phases of /k/, as well as that breath noises may be produced with a more open and slightly more front place of articulation than realizations of schwa. We found positive correlations between acoustic and physiological parameters, suggesting that when speakers inhale faster, the resulting breath noises were more intense and produced more anterior in the mouth. Inspecting the entire spectrum of speech breath noises, we showed relatively flat spectra and several weak peaks. These peaks largely overlapped with resonances reported for inhalations produced with a central vocal tract configuration. We used 3D-printed vocal tract models representing four vowels and four fricatives to simulate in- and exhalations by reversing airflow direction. We found the direction to not have a general effect for all models, but only for those with high-tongue configurations, as opposed to those that were more open. Then, we compared inhalations produced with the schwa-model to human inhalations in an attempt to approach the vocal tract configuration in speech breathing. There were some similarities, however, several complexities of human speech breathing not captured in the models complicated comparisons. In two perception studies, we investigated how much information listeners could auditorily extract from breath noises. First, we tested categorizing different breath noises into six different types, based on airflow direction and airway usage, e.g. oral inhalation. Around two thirds of all answers were correct. Second, we investigated how well breath noises could be used to discriminate between speakers and to extract coarse information on speaker characteristics, such as age (old/young) and sex (female/male). We found that listeners were able to distinguish between two breath noises coming from the same or different speakers in around two thirds of all cases. Hearing one breath noise, classification of sex was successful in around 64%, while for age it was 50%, suggesting that sex was more perceivable than age in breath noises.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 418659027: "Pause-internal phonetic particles in speech communication

Effect of hesitation sound phonetic quality on perception of language fluency and accentedness

This study investigates the perceptual consequences of nonnative versus native hesitation sounds in evaluating male speech. When the phonetic quality of a hesitation sound is consistent with native speaker hesitation sounds, the hesitation sound is “native.” A hesitation sound with phonetic quality inconsistent with native speaker hesitation sounds is “nonnative.” In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants rated sentences for fluency and accentedness on a Likert scale. In Experiments 2A and 2B, listeners performed a forced choice task to evaluate speech for accentedness and fluency. In Experiments 1A and 1B, hesitation sound phonetic quality did not impact listeners ratings. However, in Experiments 2A and 2B, participants deemed sentences with nonnative hesitation sounds less fluent and more accented compared to those with native hesitation sounds. Results show that the hesitation sound phonetic quality can have perceptual consequences and that the type of task listeners performed to evaluate speech affected accentedness and fluency judgments. This study has important implications for how learners treat pausing when practicing their second language

Phonetic characteristics of filled pauses: the effects of speakers’ age

Filled pauses usually reveal speech planning or execution problems even though the speaker does not produce an overt error and may have a function of discourse marker as well. In Hungarian, the most frequent form of filled pauses is a schwa-like vowel of various durations. The purpose of this study was to analyze the occurrence, duration and formant structure of Hungarian schwa-like filled pauses in 16 nine-year-old children, in 16 young adults and in 16 elderly speakers. Our hypotheses were that filled pauses (i) would be more frequent in elderly than in other two age groups, (ii) would show similar durations in all age groups, and (iii) would show different formant structures depending on age. Results confirmed age-dependent occurrences, durations and formants of filled pauses; the hypotheses were partly verified. Speakers’ age is one of those factors that influence the occurrences and formant values of filled pauses

Does experience change the informativity of disfluency as a marker of information status?

During conversation, listeners can use disfluency (e.g. uh, um) as a signal to expect discourse-new information. However, inferences from disfluency are attenuated once the difficulty is attributed to a characteristic of a speaker (e.g. stutterer, non-native). The current study tests whether the distribution or frequency of disfluency can change its informativity to the listener. In Experiment 1, I created a context where disfluency only occurred prior to discourse-given reference, resulting in an atypical distribution of disfluency. In Experiment 2, the stimuli were manipulated in that disfluency occurred frequently, but followed a typical distribution of disfluency (before discourse-new information). Both experiments found no effect of distribution; listeners showed a greater bias towards new information following disfluent utterances than fluent ones, regardless of whether the distribution of disfluency was novel (Exp. 1) or frequent (Exp. 2). Further research is needed to determine whether distributional learning occurs in the context of discourse processing.Master of Art

A conversation analytic/empirical pragmatic account of lecture discourse

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Listeners use intonational phrase boundaries to project turn ends in spoken interaction

In conversation, turn transitions between speakers often occur smoothly, usually within a time window of a few hundred milliseconds. It has been argued, on the basis of a button-press experiment [De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., & Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a speaker's turn: A cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language, 82(3):515–535], that participants in conversation rely mainly on lexico-syntactic information when timing and producing their turns, and that they do not need to make use of intonational cues to achieve smooth transitions and avoid overlaps. In contrast to this view, but in line with previous observational studies, our results from a dialogue task and a button-press task involving questions and answers indicate that the identification of the end of intonational phrases is necessary for smooth turn-taking. In both tasks, participants never responded to questions (i.e., gave an answer or pressed a button to indicate a turn end) at turn-internal points of syntactic completion in the absence of an intonational phrase boundary. Moreover, in the button-press task, they often pressed the button at the same point of syntactic completion when the final word of an intonational phrase was cross-spliced at that location. Furthermore, truncated stimuli ending in a syntactic completion point but lacking an intonational phrase boundary led to significantly delayed button presses. In light of these results, we argue that earlier claims that intonation is not necessary for correct turn-end projection are misguided, and that research on turn-taking should continue to consider intonation as a source of turn-end cues along with other linguistic and communicative phenomena