Enhancing Listening and Spoken Skills in Spanish Connected Speech for Anglophones

Native speech is directed towards native listeners, not designed for comprehension and analysis by language learners. Speed of delivery, or economy of effort, produces a speech signal to which the native listener can assign the correct words. There are no discrete words in the speech signal itself therefore there is often a linguistic barrier in dealing with the local spoken language.The creation, development and application of the Dynamic Spanish Speech Corpus (DSSC) facilitated an empirically-based appreciation of speaking speed and prosody as obstacles to intelligibility for learners of Spanish. “Duologues”, natural, relaxed dialogues recorded in such a manner that each interlocutor’s performance can be studied in isolation, thus avoiding problems normally caused by cross-talk and back-channelling, made possible the identification of the key phonetic features of informal native-native dialogue, and ultimately, the creation of high quality assets/ research data based on natural (unscripted) dialogues recorded at industry audio standards.These assets were used in this study, which involved documenting productive and receptive intelligibility problems when L2 users are exposed to the Spanish speech of native speakers. The aim was to observe where intelligibility problems occur and to determine the reasons for this, based on effects of the first language of the subjects, and other criteria, such as number of years learning/using Spanish, previous exposure to spoken Spanish and gender. This was achieved by playing recorded extracts/ snippets from the DSSC to which a time-scaling tool was applied

Structural competition in second language production : towards a constraint-satisfaction model

Second language (L2) learners often show inconsistent production of some aspects of L2 grammar. One view, primarily based on data from L2 article production, suggests that grammatical patterns licensed by learners’ native language (L1) and those licensed by their L2 compete for selection, leading to variability in the production of L2 functional morphology. In this study, we show that the idea of structural competition has broader applicability, in correctly predicting certain asymmetries in the production of both the definite article the and plural marking –s by Thai learners of English. At the same time, we recognize that learners’ growing sensitivity to structural regularities in the L2 might be an additional contributing factor, and therefore make a novel proposal for how the L1–L2 structural competition model and the sensitivity-to-L2-structural regularities account could be integrated and their respective contributions studied under the constraint-satisfaction model of language processing. We argue that this approach is particularly suited to studying bilingual processing as it provides a natural framework for explaining how highly disparate factors, including partially activated options from both languages, interact during processing

A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

This book offers a comprehensive description of the phonetic and phonological features of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland, North-east India. It represents the first in-depth investigation of the acoustic phonetics and phonology of tone in Sumi, and is one of the first extensive acoustic descriptions of a language of Nagaland. The book describes the segmental phonology, syllable structure and tone system of Sumi. It looks at the phonetic realisation of these tones and the effects of segmental perturbations on tone realisation. It also examines morphologically conditioned tone variation in Sumi. Finally, this book offers a cross-linguistic comparison of both the segmental phonology and tonal system of Sumi with that of other Tibeto-Burman languages of Nagaland.Copyright Information: Copyright is vested with the author; Creative Common Attribution License CC B

The production of english initial /s/ clusters by portuguese and spanish EFL speakers

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente.Este estudo contribui com dados para verificar os diferentes resultados obtidos por Carlisle (1991, 1992, 1997) e Rebello (1997a, 1997b) sobre a adição de uma vogal (epêntese) ao início de um encontro consonantal /sC(C)/ em inglês por falantes de português e espanhol. As diferenças encontradas entre os falantes das duas línguas maternas relativas às estruturas e aos contextos mais difíceis são explicadas com base na relação entre a interferência da língua materna e os universais lingüísticos. Os resultados fornecem informações relevantes ao ensino da pronúncia do inglês no Brasil e nos demais países sul-americanos

The Classification of Arabic Dialects: Traditional Approaches, New Proposals, and Methodological Problems

The question of how to classify the different varieties of spoken Arabic is a long-standing problem in the fields of Arabic and Semitic linguistics, and it has been addressed by several authors and from a number of different perspectives. This collection of articles represents a further contribution to the vast collective effort of attempting to more effectively assess, organize, and understand the varieties of spoken Arabic, applying a classification of Arabic dialects in the broadest possible sense. The authors who contribute to this volume tackle this issue by examining varieties spoken from the Maghreb to the Mashreq and employing various approaches and perspectives, e.g., diatopic and diachronic, syntactical, and typological

The tonal phonology of Chinese

Thesis. 1980. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES.Bibliography: leaves 361-372.by Moira Jean Winsland Yip.Ph.D

The mora and the syllable in KiMvita (Mombasa Swahili) and Japanese.

This thesis deals mainly with aspects of the phonology of KiMvita, the Swahili dialect spoken in Mombasa, and has special reference to moraic nasals. The KiMvita analysis is then compared to that of Standard Japanese. The framework of moraic theory that is employed is based on Hyman's (1985) "Weight Theory". The theories of Feature Geometry (FG) and Lexical Phonology (LP) are also employed in the analysis. Nasal+Consonant (N+C) sequences occur in two ways in KiMvita: (i) a sequence of a moraic nasal and a consonant; (ii) a prenasalized obstruent. The analysis of the varying expressions of nasality, either as a moraic segment or as an element of a complex segment shows considerable dependence upon the morphology concerned. In addition to N+C sequences, the analysis of Consonant+Glide (C+G) sequences turns out to be great relevance; these two different types of composite segment differ in underlying representation as well as in surface syllabification. Here too LP enables us to distinguish two distinct surface forms (light diphthongs and complex consonants) in terms of lexical vs. post-lexical levels. Syllable construction in this study crucially requires both an onset and a nucleus. Processes of syllabification will be discussed based on this theoretical requirement together with the following two assumptions: (i) strictly left-to-right syllabification; (ii) priority of the Onset Creation Rule. This study proposes that the accent bearer both in KiMvita and Japanese is not the syllable, which is generally claimed in the literature, but the mora - though this may be associated with a syllable node. Moraic nasals are generally associated with the second mora of a bimoraic syllable word-intemally in both KiMvita and Japanese. However, there is one significant difference in the status of the second mora in these two languages: it may bear accent in KiMvita, while it may not in Japanese. As far as these two languages are concerned, the phonetic evidence suggests that the actual segment duration could explain why such a difference occurs