The role of linguistics in language teaching: the case of two, less widely taught languages - Finnish and Hungarian

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well suited for less widely used and less taught languages as it enables students to draw comparative and historical parallels, question terminologies and raise their sociolinguistic and pragmatic awareness. A linguistic approach also provides students with skills for further language learning

Cognition, Language and Aging

Age-related changes in cognitive and language functions have been extensively researched over the past half-century. The older adult represents a unique population for studying cognition and language because of the many challenges that are presented with investigating this population, including individual differences in education, life experiences, health issues, social identity, as well as gender. The purpose of this book is to provide an advanced text that considers these unique challenges and assembles in one source current information regarding (a) language in the aging population and (b) current theories accounting for age-related changes in language function. A thoughtful and comprehensive review of current research spanning different disciplines that study aging will achieve this purpose. Such disciplines include linguistics, psychology, sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences, and communication sciences

Construction of a corpus of elderly Japanese speech for analysis and recognition

Tokushima UniversityAichi Prefectural UniversityUniversity of YamanashiLREC 2018 Special Speech Sessions "Speech Resources Collection in Real-World Situations"; Phoenix Seagaia Conference Center, Miyazaki; 2018-05-09We have constructed a new speech data corpus using the utterances of 100 elderly Japanese people, in order to improve the accuracy of automatic recognition of the speech of older people. Humanoid robots are being developed for use in elder care nursing facilities because interaction with such robots is expected to help clients maintain their cognitive abilities, as well as provide them with companionship. In order for these robots to interact with the elderly through spoken dialogue, a high performance speech recognition system for the speech of elderly people is needed. To develop such a system, we recorded speech uttered by 100 elderly Japanese who had an average age of 77.2, most of them living in nursing homes. Another corpus of elderly Japanese speech called S-JNAS (Seniors-Japanese Newspaper Article Sentences) has been developed previously, but the average age of the participants was 67.6. Since the target age for nursing home care is around 75, much higher than that of most of the S-JNAS samples, we felt a more representative corpus was needed. In this study we compare the performance of our new corpus with both the Japanese read speech corpus JNAS (Japanese Newspaper Article Speech), which consists of adult speech, and with the S-JNAS, the senior version of JNAS, by conducting speech recognition experiments. Data from the JNAS, S-JNAS and CSJ (Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese) was used as training data for the acoustic models, respectively. We then used our new corpus to adapt the acoustic models to elderly speech, but we were unable to achieve sufficient performance when attempting to recognize elderly speech. Based on our experimental results, we believe that development of a corpus of spontaneous elderly speech and/or special acoustic adaptation methods will likely be necessary to improve the recognition performance of dialog systems for the elderly

Lexical representations of Chinese single characters tested through reformed and standard phonetic compounds

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), University of Hong Kong, April 30, 1992.Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1992Also available in print.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

The Use of American and British Lexis in Brunei English

In pronunciation, influenced by American English, a shift in Brunei English can be observed in the increasing use of [r] in tokens such as car and heard particularly among younger speakers whose pronunciation may be influenced by American English. In contrast, older speakers tend to omit the [r] sound in these tokens as their pronunciation may be more influenced by British English. However, it is unclear whether American English has influenced the vocabulary of Brunei English speakers as the education system in Brunei favours British English due to its historical ties with Britain. This paper analyses the use of American and British  lexical items between three age groups: 20 in-service teachers aged between 29 to 35 years old, 20 university undergraduates aged between 19 to 25 years old, and 20 secondary school students who are within the 11 to 15 age range. Each age group has 10 female and 10 male participants and they were asked to name seven objects shown to them on Power point slides. Their responses were recorded and compared between the age groups and between female and male data. The analysis is supplemented with recorded data from interviews with all 60 participants to determine instances of American and British lexical items in casual speech. It was found that there is a higher occurrence of American than British lexical items in all three groups and the interview data supports the findings in the main data. Thus, providing further evidence for the Americanisation of Brunei English and that Brunei English is undergoing change

Child language documentation: The sketch acquisition project

This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons

Guam English: Emergence, Development and Variation

This dissertation explores the emergence, development and internal variation of the English variety spoken in Guam. The island located in the North-Western Pacific Ocean has a diverse colonial past, with each colonial ruler (Spain, the U.S. and briefly Japan) enforcing their national language on the inhabitants. As a result of ongoing close contact to the most recent colonial power, the U.S., the inhabitants have undergone a shift from speaking their indigenous language, Chamorro, as a first language to speaking English (almost) monolingually. This shift was likely promoted by language policies making English an official language to be used in the government and in education, the high presence of American media, but also a change toward positive attitudes regarding the language of the colonizer. It was particularly the WWII-generations that regarded English as the vehicle for economic success and decided to raise their children in English. Although the socio-historic circumstances that likely led to this shift in language use have been well-documented, no research describes the influence of these changes on Guam English. I intend to bridge this gap in research by providing a general linguistic description of Guam English, as well as a more detailed analysis of the short front vowels KIT, DRESS and TRAP, including developmental patterns and inter-speaker variation. I employ the apparent time model, analyzing approximately 45 min long sociolinguistic interviews. The corpus includes 89 socially stratified Guam locals, males and females of different levels of education, ranging in age from 16 to 91 of three ethnic groups, Chamorros, Filipinos and Caucasians. A special focus is put on the indigenous community, the Chamorros, for the analysis of the short front vowels. I find that the language shift from the indigenous language to English is reflected in the phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical structure of Guam English: while the oldest segment of the population, locally referred to as the Manåmko’, speaks English as a second language and shows a multitude of substrate language influence, the younger generations not only lack a majority of those substrate-related features, but show developmental tendencies toward the variety of their colonial power, the U.S. This includes the use of more standardized features, but also signs of convergence toward a regional, ethnic variety of American English. The latter development is noticeable in a range of linguistic features that younger Guam English speakers share with regional or ethnic communities of the U.S. mainland: Realizations of the short front vowels KIT, DRESS and TRAP resemble that of ethnic California speakers. KIT and DRESS are retracting in apparent time and TRAP remains in its low-back position, lacking a clear nasal split. Though Guam’s English-speaking community generally follows those generational tendencies, there is much internal variation, as the population is stratified in regards to their ethnicity and educational backgrounds. A broad spectrum of acrolectal and basilectal speech is found in all age groups. With this research, I hope to shed light on a previously under-researched variety of English that emerged as a result of colonial contact to the U.S. In describing the variety in detail, I am able to compare it to the developmental trajectories of other World Englishes. This includes positioning Guam English in various models suggested by scholars, such as Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model, to better systematize developmental patterns of World Englishes. In this regard, previous research has mainly focused on Britain as a linguistically influential colonial power, whereas we know very little about Englishes emerging out of colonial contact to the U.S

Child language documentation: The sketch acquisition project

This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons