A study on reusing resources of speech synthesis for closely-related languages

This thesis describes research on building a text-to-speech (TTS) framework that can accommodate the lack of linguistic information of under-resource languages by using existing resources from another language. It describes the adaptation process required when such limited resource is used. The main natural languages involved in this research are Malay and Iban language. The thesis includes a study on grapheme to phoneme mapping and the substitution of phonemes. A set of substitution matrices is presented which show the phoneme confusion in term of perception among respondents. The experiments conducted study the intelligibility as well as perception based on context of utterances. The study on the phonetic prosody is then presented and compared to the Klatt duration model. This is to find the similarities of cross language duration model if one exists. Then a comparative study of Iban native speaker with an Iban polyglot TTS using Malay resources is presented. This is to confirm that the prosody of Malay can be used to generate Iban synthesised speech. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that by using a closely-related language resource, a natural sounding speech can be produced. The aim of this research was to show that by sticking to the indigenous language characteristics, it is possible to build a polyglot synthesised speech system even with insufficient speech resources

A corpus-based comparative pragmatic analysis of Irish English and Canadian English

This PhD thesis is a comparative study of the spoken grammar of Irish and Canadian Englishes within the framework of Variational Pragmatics at the formal level, used to study the pragmatic variation (the intra-varietal differences) in terms of forms and pragmatic functions. It is a study of spoken grammar as a whole (in a comparative and representative way between and across two varieties of English). Corpus linguistics is used as a methodological tool in order to conduct this research, exploring the nature of spoken grammar usage in both varieties comparatively in relation to their pragmatic functions and forms. The study illustrates an iterative approach in which top-down and bottom-up processes are used to establish pragmatic markers and their pragmatic functions in spoken grammar in the two varieties. Top-down analysis employs a framework for spoken grammar based on existing literature while the bottom-up process is based on micro-analysis of the data. The corpora used in the study are the spoken components of two International Corpus of English (ICE) corpora, namely ICE-Ireland and ICE-Canada comprising 600,000 words each (approximately). Methodologically, this study is not purely corpus-based nor corpus-driven but employs both methods. This iterative approach aligns with the notions of corpus-based versus corpus-driven linguistics and perspectives. Corpus tools are used to generate wordlists of the top 100 most frequent word and cluster lists. These are then analysed through qualitative analysis in order to identify whether or not they are a part of the spoken grammar. This process results in a candidate list that can then be functionally categorised and compared across varieties in terms of forms and functions. Specifically, the study offers insights on pragmatic markers: discourse markers, response tokens, questions, hedges and stance markers in Irish and Canadian English. The results offer a baseline description of the commonalities and differences in terms of spoken grammar and pragmatics across the two varieties of English which may have application to the study of other varieties of English. Also, the prominent forms of spoken grammar across these two varieties can be further explored from a macro-social perspective (e.g. age, gender, or social class) and a micro-social perspective (e.g. social distance or social dominance) and how these interplay with pragmatic choices.N

AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH TEACHERS’ QUESTIONS IN PROMOTING THINKING SKILLS AT SMP N 8 YOGYAKARTA

This research aims to analyze the teachers’ questions in promoting thinking skills at SMP N 8 Yogyakarta. This research was descriptive qualitative research, but it used both qualitative and quantitative data. The data were collected from the questions performed by two teachers of 8th grade at SMP N 8 Yogyakarta in 22 meetings. The questions were classisfied into types of questions and cognitive domains. The results of the research show that the teacher performed four types of questions, which include factual questions, empirical questions, evaluative questions, and productive questions. Factual questions occured dominantly rather than other types of questions. It implies that teachers’ questions promote more lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) instead of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). The teachers’ questions were also determined comprising a negotiation of meaning as the questioning strategies

Universal and language-specific processing : the case of prosody

A key question in the science of language is how speech processing can be influenced by both language-universal and language-specific mechanisms (Cutler, Klein, & Levinson, 2005). My graduate research aimed to address this question by adopting a crosslanguage approach to compare languages with different phonological systems. Of all components of linguistic structure, prosody is often considered to be one of the most language-specific dimensions of speech. This can have significant implications for our understanding of language use, because much of speech processing is specifically tailored to the structure and requirements of the native language. However, it is still unclear whether prosody may also play a universal role across languages, and very little comparative attempts have been made to explore this possibility. In this thesis, I examined both the production and perception of prosodic cues to prominence and phrasing in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese. In focus production, our research revealed that English and Mandarin speakers were alike in how they used prosody to encode prominence, but there were also systematic language-specific differences in the exact degree to which they enhanced the different prosodic cues (Chapter 2). This, however, was not the case in focus perception, where English and Mandarin listeners were alike in the degree to which they used prosody to predict upcoming prominence, even though the precise cues in the preceding prosody could differ (Chapter 3). Further experiments examining prosodic focus prediction in the speech of different talkers have demonstrated functional cue equivalence in prosodic focus detection (Chapter 4). Likewise, our experiments have also revealed both crosslanguage similarities and differences in the production and perception of juncture cues (Chapter 5). Overall, prosodic processing is the result of a complex but subtle interplay of universal and language-specific structure

Fluency Strategy Training and the L2 Oral Task Performance of Indonesian EFL Classroom Learners

This quasi-experimental study investigated the impacts of two instructional conditions, explicit fluency strategy training and implicit task-based instruction, on university English learners in Indonesia. The results revealed that both instructional conditions could not significantly improve participants’ speech fluency, but improvement on oral proficiency reached statistical significance. A degree of variability in participants’ speech fluency development was also found. Both instructional conditions could be applied with potentially complementary effects in Indonesian EFL classrooms

The effect of explicit instruction and auditory/audio-visual training on Chinese EFL learner's perception of intonation

Ph. D. Thesis (Integrated)Intonation accounts for a big part in speech intelligibility and is notoriously difficult to be acquired by L2 learners. The bulk of research on L2 intonation has focussed on the examination of learners’ intonational performance at the phonetic and phonological levels using perceptual and/or production tasks; however, empirical studies on whether and how intonation training can help improve learners’ performance are surprisingly scarce. This study fills this gap by devising instruction and training materials which were meticulously tailored for Chinese learners of English, the largest population of English learners in the world. The participants were 60 English-related majoring students from Newcastle University, most of whom wanted to become English teachers following their studies. They were pseudorandomly mapped into three groups according to their overall English proficiency. Two of the groups were taught explicitly on the forms and functions of English intonation but one selfpracticed auditorily on Audacity whereas the other audio-visually on Praat. The third group, which served as control, did not get any intonation training. Learners’ competence of intonation was assessed by a comprehension task before, immediately after, and two months after the three-week training course. Ten native speakers of Southern British English were recruited for the pre- and post-test to set a baseline for the analysis of learners’ performance. The results are: 1. Chinese EFL learners did significantly worse than native speakers in terms of understanding intonation meanings contrasted by accentuation, phrasing, and tone. 2. Learners’ comprehension ability was improved immediately after the training for all three aspects. 3. The training effect remain in the delayed post-test. 4. The audio-visual group did not perform significantly better than the auditory group. The results indicate that certain aspects of intonation are teachable and learnable, and tailor-made instruction and materials are effective and applicable in use. This study provides English teachers in China with novel ways to equip Chinese EFL learners with greater intonational competence

Pre-service English as foreign language (EFL) teachers’ perception toward revised Bloom’s taxonomy in cognitive domain and the implementation to their lesson plans

Bloom’s Taxonomy has given rise to educational concepts including terms such as high and low-level thinking. Mastering knowledge about the curriculum, English language material and educational theory as a professional competence is very much required for pre-service English teachers to have. This research aimed to explain the perception of pre-service English teachers about cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy and the implementation to their lesson plans. In this research, the descriptive qualitative method was employed. The data were obtained through interview and documentation. The participants of this research were twenty English students at sixth semester of English Language Education in UIN Walisongo in the academic year 2019/2020. The researcher conducted the interview with the participants and analyzed the answer of questions. A documentation also conducted by analyzing their lesson plans. The results showed that pre-service EFL teachers have different perception about Bloom’s taxonomy and cognitive domain. All of them implemented the cognitive domain in their lesson plans. In designing lesson plans, they faced some difficulties in implementing the cognitive domain

Symmetrical Voice Constructions in Besemah: A Usage-based Approach

This dissertation presents a comprehensive account of the symmetrical voice system in Besemah, an under-documented Malayic language spoken in the highlands of southwest Sumatra, Indonesia. Utilizing a corpus primarily consisting of conversational data, but also including narrative data, this study treats both the syntactic structure and discourse properties of symmetrical voice constructions in Besemah. Previous research on voice in the languages of western Indonesia has sought to understand these languages in terms of well-established systems of voice and grammatical relations, whether that be active-passive or ergative-absolutive. Since the notion of symmetrical voice—a voice system with multiple transitive voice constructions, none of which is clearly the ‘basic’ voice form—was introduced by Foley (1998) just under two decades ago, it has provided valuable insights into the voice systems of the languages of western Indonesia (Riesberg 2014). Drawing on these insights, this dissertation presents a thorough treatment of symmetrical voice in Besemah, which has not been the subject of any in-depth grammatical analysis.The dissertation has two primary objectives. The first objective is to describe the syntactic nature of symmetrical voice by identifying grammatical relations in Besemah. Based on several ‘diagnostic’ constructions that have been used to provide evidence for grammatical relations in related languages of western Indonesia, this study identifies two grammatical relations in Besemah, primary argument and secondary argument, by utilizing data from the corpus of Besemah. While two of these ‘diagnostic’ constructions, word order and quantifiability, provide evidence for grammatical relations in Besemah, this study demonstrates that many of these ‘diagnostic’ constructions cannot be used for determining grammatical relations in Besemah.The second objective seeks to answer the following question concerning voice selection in Besemah: at any given point in a conversation, what factors lead a speaker to choose one symmetrical voice construction over the other? In order to answer this question, this study uses advanced statistics to investigate the role of information flow (Chafe 1994), syntactic priming (Gries 2005), and collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) in voice selection. The findings reveal that each of these factors play an important role in voice selection in Besemah conversation