Accent identification by adults with aphasia

The UK is a diverse society where individuals regularly interact with speakers with different accents. Whilst there is a growing body of research on the impact of speaker accent on comprehension in people with aphasia, there is none which explores their ability to identify accents. This study investigated the ability of this group to identify the geographical origins of a speaker. Age-matched participants with and without aphasia listened to 120 audio recordings of five speakers each of six accents, reading aloud four sentences each. Listeners were asked to make a forced-choice decision about the geographical origin of the speaker. Adults with aphasia were significantly less accurate than control participants at identifying accents but both groups made the same pattern of errors. Adults with aphasia who are able to identify a new speaker as being from a particular place may draw on this information to help them “tune in” to the accent

PERCEPTION OF ACCENTS AND DIALECTS IN ADULTS AND INFANTS

This thesis has been undertaken with the purpose of investigating how adult speech processing systems are affected by. and how they cope with, the presence of different regional and foreign accents in speech, and to investigate the developmental origins of adult accent perception capabilities. Experiments 1 to 4 were designed to investigate the long term effects of exposure to different accents, and whether short term adaptation to an accent was possible, using a lexical decision task. The results demonstrated an effect of accent familiarity but no short term adaptation was evident. Experiments 5 to 7 investigated the short term effects of accents by looking at the length of activation of accent-related information in working memory by using a cross-modal matching task. The results found that selective accent related effects were reduced after a 1500 millisecond delay. Experiments 8 to 11 investigated infants' discrimination abilities for regional and foreign accents using a preferential looking habituation method, and found infants at 5 and 7 months could discriminate their own accent from another, unfamiliar regional accent, but could not discriminate two unfamiliar regional accents at 5 months or a foreign accent from their own at 7 months. Experiments 12 and 13 investigated how accents affected infants' word segmentation abilities with continuous speech at 10 months, and found that segmentation was impaired in the presence of regional and foreign accents. Using these results, the Accent Training Model (ATP) is proposed, which attempts to explain how accent related indexical information is processed in the speech processing system. The findings of the infant studies further our understanding of the effect of indexicat variation in early speech perception

Dialect, drama and translation : a socio-cultural investigation into the factors influencing the choice of strategies in German-speaking Europe

This thesis examines the translation of dialect in drama in German-speaking Europe, exploring the complex influences on the choice of strategies by practitioners. Utilising paradigms of Descriptive Translation Studies, polysystem theory and norms theory, it investigates how the target culture influences dialect translation practice. The study offers, for the first time, a systematic overview of the functions of dialect in drama, and the translation strategies available, identifying the influences on dialect translation practice in northern Germany, German-speaking Switzerland and Scotland. Based on these, three research areas are explored, focussing on northern Germany, German-speaking Switzerland and Luxembourg: - the sociolinguistic situation and the emergence of oral standard; - the use of dialect in German-language drama as a stylistic device in particular genres and, especially, for socio-political functions; - how the translation process illuminates the norms for drama and dialect translation and their connection with both sociolinguistic factors and norms of German drama production. Three case studies exemplify the findings, illustrating the complexity of targetculture- related factors that had an impact on translating three British plays into standard and into Swiss German, Low German and Luxembourgish: Stephen Greenhorn’s Passing Places, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife. This study offers a unique insight into drama and dialect translation in Germanspeaking Europe. It demonstrates that the introduction of an oral standard mitigates against dialect use in German original drama and translations; that changing relationships between German-speaking countries, nationalist movements and efforts to raise the status of a dialect encourage its use in drama; and that genres like comedy, murder mystery, farce, but also Naturalist, Realist and folk plays are more likely to use, and be translated into, dialect. It suggests similar projects for other countries, and will be of relevance to theatre and translation practitioners

Relative Salience of Speech Rhythm and Speech Rate on Perceived Foreign Accent in a Second Language

We investigated the independent contribution of speech rate and speech rhythm to perceived foreign accent. To address this issue we used a resynthesis technique that allows neutralizing segmental and tonal idiosyncrasies between identical sentences produced by French learners of English at different proficiency levels and maintaining the idiosyncrasies pertaining to prosodic timing patterns. We created stimuli that (1) preserved the idiosyncrasies in speech rhythm while controlling for the differences in speech rate between the utterances; (2) preserved the idiosyncrasies in speech rate while controlling for the differences in speech rhythm between the utterances; and (3) preserved the idiosyncrasies both in speech rate and speech rhythm. All the stimuli were created in intoned (with imposed intonational contour) and flat (with monotonized, constant F0) conditions. The original and the resynthesized sentences were rated by native speakers of English for degree of foreign accent. We found that both speech rate and speech rhythm influence the degree of perceived foreign accent, but the effect of speech rhythm is larger than that of speech rate. We also found that intonation enhances the perception of fine differences in rhythmic patterns but reduces the perceptual salience of fine differences in speech rate

The Translation of Language Attitudes

I denne oppgaven undersøkes språkholdningene som finnes i animasjonsfilmer for barn produsert i USA i det 21. århundret. Formålet med oppgaven er todelt: å undersøke om det finnes systematiske korrelasjoner mellom karaktertrekk og ulike språkvarianter i animasjonsfilmer i original versjon samt i norsk dubbet versjon, og å se om det finnes korrelasjoner mellom enkelte engelske språkvarianter og norske dialekter. Ti filmer ble analysert i norsk og engelsk versjon, og alle karakterer ble kodet etter en rekke lingvistiske og ikke-lingvistiske trekk. Oppgaven er inspirert av lignende studier med fokus på engelske språkvarianter i film og TV. Ved oppstarten av denne oppgaven var det meg bekjent ingen tidligere studier som sammenlignet norske og engelske språkholdninger i film, og denne oppgaven fyller dermed et hull i språkholdningsfeltet både i norsk og engelsk forskningsmiljø. Det var ventet å finne systematiske korrelasjoner mellom språkvarianter og alle karaktertrekk analysert både i de originale filmene og de norske versjonene. Det var med grunnlag i dette også en forventning om at enkelte engelske språkvarianter skulle korrespondere direkte med norske dialekter, slik at karaktertrekkene korrelerte med språkvarianter med liknende konnotasjoner og stereotyper i begge språk. Funnene viste noe overraskende en ekstrem homogenitet i språkvarianter for begge språk, hvor de dominerende språkvariantene er General American i de originale filmene og Østnorsk i de dubbede versjonene. Likevel finnes enkelte systematiske korrelasjoner, både mellom karaktertrekk og språkvarianter og mellom språkene.  Engelsk mastergradsoppgaveENG350MAHF-ENGMAHF-LÆF

May the Accent Be with You: An attitudinal study of language use in the Star Wars trilogies

Føremålet med denne studien har vore å analysere bruken av engelske uttalevariantar i dei tre Star Wars trilogiane, for å finne potensielle systematiske korrelasjonar mellom karakterane sin aksent, og deira karaktertrekk. Slike korrelasjonar kan avdekke bakanforliggande haldningar til ulike uttalevariantar, og dermed seie noko om korleis samfunnet ser på og behandlar ulike aksentar. Den aller første Star Wars-filmen vart utgjeven i 1977, og den nyaste filmen kom i 2019. Dette store tidsspennet mellom dei ulike trilogiane gjer Star Wars- filmane unike i sitt slag. I tillegg til å undersøkje korrelasjonar mellom aksent og karaktertrekk, ser denne oppgåva også på potensielle endringar i framstillinga av ulike aksentar, og om filmane over tid har blitt meir mangfaldige og inkluderande, i tråd med samfunnsmessige endringar dei siste 50 åra. Forsking tyder på at haldningar til språk blir forma tidleg i livet, gjennom blant anna opplevingar, media og personane ein har rundt seg (Garrett, Coupland, and Williams 2003). Star Wars trilogiane har blitt sett over heile verda, av folk i alle aldrar, og har vakse til å bli eit enormt populært univers. Filmane spelar potensielt ei viktig rolle i sosialiseringsprosessen til barn og unge, og er dermed ein påverknadsfaktor til haldningane dei utviklar. Måten ulike aksentar og lingvistiske grupper blir framstilt på i media og film er difor sentral for korleis dei blir oppfatta i samfunnet, og kan ha stor påverknad på korleis språkbrukarar ser på seg sjølve. Analysen av filmane viser at somme korrelasjonar mellom uttalemåte og karaktertrekk kan identifiserast i Star Wars-filmane, særleg når det gjeld kor sofistikert ein karakter er, kor stor rolle den har i filmane, samt om den er god eller vond. I tillegg kan ein sjå at ei endring har funne stad mellom den første trilogien og den siste, men det var til dels ikkje den endringa som var forventa. Filmane har utvilsamt blitt meir inkluderande når det gjeld etnisitet og kjønn, men har bevega seg i motsett retning når det gjeld språkleg mangfald, då standard britisk og standard amerikansk dominerer meir enn nokon sinne i den nyaste trilogien. Standard britisk har særleg hatt ei drastisk auke, medan bruken av standard amerikansk har minka. Ein kan spekulere i at grunnen til den store auka av standardaksentar, og då særleg britisk, er fokuset på politisk korrektheit i samfunnet, samt at desse moglegvis er lettare å forstå for eit internasjonalt publikum enn regionale og sosiale uttalevariantar. Samstundes kan ein hevde at lite mangfald av ulike uttalevariantar potensielt kan vere negativt for dei språkbrukargruppene som ikkje ser seg sjølve representerte i media og film.Engelsk mastergradsoppgåveENG350MAHF-ENGMAHF-LÆF

Beyond monolingualism: a descriptive and multimodal methodology for the dubbing of polyglot films

The days of English as the hegemonic language of cinema are slowly disappearing. Nowadays, filmmakers from different film industries are gradually embracing a multilingual shoot where languages coexist and play a key role within a film’s diegesis. This polyglot reality has brought up interesting questions and issues for the discipline of Translation Studies, where translation has been traditionally understood more in terms of going from one source language into one target language. Within the field of Audiovisual Translation (AVT), studies have concentrated on films where the presence of foreign languages is either sporadic or secondary and, as such, foreign languages have been mostly relegated to purely linguistic approaches. Interestingly, films in which foreign languages constantly reoccur or have a primary function have been hitherto widely disregarded, despite presenting the most complex scenario. Similarly, although researchers increasingly stress the relevance of film language on translational solutions, multimodal approaches to multilingualism in films remain scant. In light of this, this thesis designs a descriptive and multimodal methodology to investigate the issue of multilingualism at every stage of the dubbing process and to explore the effect of dubbing on both the plot and characterisation of polyglot films. This methodology is further complemented by para-textual information and semi-structured interviews to obtain a global perspective of the translation of the multilingual aspect. To this end, this thesis examines four polyglot films in which it is difficult to determine a predominant language. By investigating those with recurring use of languages, this project accounts for the most complex films in terms of language quantity and interplay to transcend textual restrictions and incorporate further issues surrounding translation as both process and product. This examination of original polyglot films brings to light the relevance of intermediate translations for the dubbing process as these are the foundations of the ‘rough’ translation on which the whole process relies. In turn, the macrostructure analysis unveils the use of a plethora of AVT modalities when dealing with foreign languages. Similarly, it suggests that decisions at this level depend on a complex interplay of factors of diverse natures such as filmmakers’ requests, screening habits, financial means, and film features. At the micro-textual level, a thorough list of translation techniques is compiled and their application is measured in relation to the influence of signifying codes. Additionally, a close linguistic examination of dialogue reveals a tendency towards standardisation, although certain nuances are sometimes enforced by character synchrony or added optionally to minor characters. Throughout these analyses, it becomes evident that all dubbing agents manipulate some aspects of multilingualism. Ultimately, this study suggests that dubbing affects polyglot films by hiding certain linguistic connotations and by providing different information to domestic and target audiences