Word juncture characteristics in world Englishes: a research report

The subtle juncture cues in older varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation can be difficult for speakers of new English varieties to perceive. This study looks at the perception of word juncture characteristics in three varieties of English (British, Hong Kong and Singapore) among British, Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners in order to widen our understanding of English juncture characteristics in general. We find that, even though reaction time data indicates that listeners perform quickest in the variety they are most familiar with, not only are juncture differences in British English difficult for Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners to perceive, they are also the most difficult for British listeners. Juncture characteristics in Hong Kong English are the easiest to distinguish among the three varieties

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACOUSTIC FEATURES OF SECOND LANGUAGE SPEECH AND LISTENER EVALUATION OF SPEECH QUALITY

Second language (L2) speech is typically less fluent than native speech, and differs from it phonetically. While the speech of some L2 English speakers seems to be easily understood by native listeners despite the presence of a foreign accent, other L2 speech seems to be more demanding, such that listeners must expend considerable effort in order to understand it. One reason for this increased difficulty may simply be the speaker’s pronunciation accuracy or phonetic intelligibility. If a L2 speaker’s pronunciations of English sounds differ sufficiently from the sounds that native listeners expect, these differences may force native listeners to work much harder to understand the divergent speech patterns. However, L2 speakers also tend to differ from native ones in terms of fluency – the degree to which a speaker is able to produce appropriately structured phrases without unnecessary pauses, self-corrections or restarts. Previous studies have shown that measures of fluency are strongly predictive of listeners’ subjective ratings of the acceptability of L2 speech: Less fluent speech is consistently considered less acceptable (Ginther, Dimova, & Yang, 2010). However, since less fluent speakers tend also to have less accurate pronunciations, it is unclear whether or how these factors might interact to influence the amount of effort listeners exert to understand L2 speech, nor is it clear how listening effort might relate to perceived quality or acceptability of speech. In this dissertation, two experiments were designed to investigate these questions

Production and perception of speaker-specific phonetic detail at word boundaries

Experiments show that learning about familiar voices affects speech processing in many tasks. However, most studies focus on isolated phonemes or words and do not explore which phonetic properties are learned about or retained in memory. This work investigated inter-speaker phonetic variation involving word boundaries, and its perceptual consequences. A production experiment found significant variation in the extent to which speakers used a number of acoustic properties to distinguish junctural minimal pairs e.g. 'So he diced them'—'So he'd iced them'. A perception experiment then tested intelligibility in noise of the junctural minimal pairs before and after familiarisation with a particular voice. Subjects who heard the same voice during testing as during the familiarisation period showed significantly more improvement in identification of words and syllable constituents around word boundaries than those who heard different voices. These data support the view that perceptual learning about the particular pronunciations associated with individual speakers helps listeners to identify syllabic structure and the location of word boundaries

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community

Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh, and English-Welsh bilingual infants

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure the familiarity effect was detected as early as 10 months in English but did not reach significance in monolingual Welsh. Bilingual children showed word form familiarity effects by 11 months in both languages and also revealed an online time course for word recognition that combined effects found for monolingual English and Welsh. To account for the findings, accentual, grammatical, and sociolinguistic differences between English and Welsh are considered

Cappadocian in the social media era

Until very recently, Cappadocian Greek seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and dialectologists even believed it had become extinct altogether. However, one Cappadocian variety, Mišótika, is still spoken in some villages and towns in the decentralized administrations of Macedonia and Thrace, Epirus and Western Macedonia, and Thessaly and Central Greece. The dialect is undergoing attrition under the growing pressure of Standard Modern Greek and its regional varieties and is actually being re-Hellenized. Even the oldest speakers make free use of Greek instead of Misiótika words and expressions and attrition is noticeable in at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. As a result, there are now many semi- or even would-be speakers whose speech is located somewhere on a continuum from Mišótika with Standard or Regional Modern Greek elements in it to Standard or Regional Modern Greek with Mišótika elements in it - in both cases mostly words and phrases. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Mišótika as a marker of (Mišótika) Cappadocian identity. Speakers feel more confident to speak their language in public, for instance at the annual Gavoustima, where theatrical plays in Mišótika are now regularly performed by the syllogos of Néo Agionéri (to the amusement and also to bewilderment of the audience). Remarkably and very fortunately, Mišótika is now also used in the Social Media. I will concentrate here on Facebook, especially on the page called Έναρξη Διδασκαλίας Εκµάθησης Μυστιώτικου Ιδιώµατος ( group 470281169768316 on FB). The title is identical with the subtitle of Thomas Fates’ book Χ͜ιογός α ας χαρίσ̌’, which is some sort of “Teach Yourself Mišótika” and in which, interestingly, a special orthography for Mišótika has been developed. I will discuss the kind of information found on the FB page: questions, questionnaires, explanations of words and short phrases, folktales and other short stories, audio & video clips etc. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of using the Greek alphabet to write Mišótika in relation to the ongoing phonological attrition and also to the insecurity when it comes to interpretation linguistic phenomena in Mišótika

Vybrané fonologické jevy způsobující obtížnosti při porozumění anglického mluveného projevu

Ačkoliv je Anglický jazyk jeden z nejrozšířenějších na světě, řadou lidí je označován jako těžko srozumitelný. V tomto smyslu hovoří dokonce i mnozí z těch, kteří jej sami poměrně slušně zvládají, při čemž často poukazují na fakt, že při komunikaci s rodilým mluvčím nejsou mnohdy schopni porozumět ani výrazům, které jinak patří do jejich aktivní slovní zásoby. Cílem této práce je zaměřit se na vybrané fonologické jevy, které lze pozorovat zpravidla výlučně v projevu rodilých mluvčí a kterými jsou obtíže při porozumění mluveného Anglického jazyka způsobovány.Katedra anglického jazykaObhájenoThe goal of this thesis is to take a look at selected phonological phenomena that are observable in the speech of the native speakers of the English language and show that these cause difficulties in understanding spoken English discourse to both the non-native learners and users of the English language as well as to other native speakers

Stress group patterns, sentence accents and sentence intonation in southern Jutland (Sønderborg and Tønder) - with a view to German

This paper investigates prosodic stress group patterns, the presence and manifestation of default and focal sentence accents and the nature of sentence intonation signalling in Standard Danish spoken on a substratum of South Jutland dialects, viz. Sønderborg and Tønder, and in two varieties of German, Standard North German and Flensburg. The following facts appear: sentence intonation (understood to encompass both utterance function and utterance juncture) is signalled globally in Tønder, locally in Sønderborg, and with a mixture of global and local signalling in German. Default accents are nonexistent in the two Danish varieties, optional in German. Focus is signalled, optionally (and never in final position), by stress reduction of the surroundings in the Danish regions, but is compulsory and takes the shape of a proper sentence accent, though modest, in German. Sønderborg and German have unambiguous final lengthening, whereas both lengthening and shortening finally occurs in Tønder. Prosodic stress group patterns suffer a clean truncation when their duration is shortened in the Danish regions, but a mixture of compression and truncation in German. Finally, Tønder has stød, Sønderborg and (of course) German do not

Prosodic means’ interaction in realising the anecdote humorous effect

In the paper, on the basis of auditory analysis of English spoken anecdotes the authors come up with the system of prosodic means that serve to create the text humorous effect. To define the specificity of a complex interaction of emotional, pragmatic, structural and semantic factors of prosodic means’ functioning in English anecdotes, we substantiated two algorithmic models presenting the text story-line development: one being similar to the structure of the fairy tale (introduction → commentary → code), and the other one resembling the riddle (topic → commentary → code). By way of using these models as well as the traditional method of linguistic interpretation of the auditory analysis results, the authors substantiate the specificity of prosodic, lexico-grammatical and stylistic means interaction of an English anecdote oral actualisation functioning within its structural components. It has been found out that realisation of the anecdote humorous effect is ensured by the predominance of the unidirectional functioning of the language means of all levels with the leading role of prosodic means aimed at drawing the listeners’ attention to the anecdote’s two-plane semantics and its key lexical units, thus stimulating their thinking activities while decoding the humour of the anecdote. The authors come to the conclusion that the application of a functional-and-energetic approach to the study of a complex interaction of emotional, pragmatic, semantic and structural factors makes it possible to present a comprehensive description of invariant and variant prosodic patterns of any type of texts