Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies

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

The listening talker: A review of human and algorithmic context-induced modifications of speech

International audienceSpeech output technology is finding widespread application, including in scenarios where intelligibility might be compromised - at least for some listeners - by adverse conditions. Unlike most current algorithms, talkers continually adapt their speech patterns as a response to the immediate context of spoken communication, where the type of interlocutor and the environment are the dominant situational factors influencing speech production. Observations of talker behaviour can motivate the design of more robust speech output algorithms. Starting with a listener-oriented categorisation of possible goals for speech modification, this review article summarises the extensive set of behavioural findings related to human speech modification, identifies which factors appear to be beneficial, and goes on to examine previous computational attempts to improve intelligibility in noise. The review concludes by tabulating 46 speech modifications, many of which have yet to be perceptually or algorithmically evaluated. Consequently, the review provides a roadmap for future work in improving the robustness of speech output

Sub-word indexing and blind relevance feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR

The Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) provides document collections, topics, and relevance assessments for information retrieval (IR) experiments on Indian languages. Several research questions are explored in this paper: 1. how to create create a simple, languageindependent corpus-based stemmer, 2. how to identify sub-words and which types of sub-words are suitable as indexing units, and 3. how to apply blind relevance feedback on sub-words and how feedback term selection is affected by the type of the indexing unit. More than 140 IR experiments are conducted using the BM25 retrieval model on the topic titles and descriptions (TD) for the FIRE 2008 English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi document collections. The major findings are: The corpus-based stemming approach is effective as a knowledge-light term conation step and useful in case of few language-specific resources. For English, the corpusbased stemmer performs nearly as well as the Porter stemmer and significantly better than the baseline of indexing words when combined with query expansion. In combination with blind relevance feedback, it also performs significantly better than the baseline for Bengali and Marathi IR. Sub-words such as consonant-vowel sequences and word prefixes can yield similar or better performance in comparison to word indexing. There is no best performing method for all languages. For English, indexing using the Porter stemmer performs best, for Bengali and Marathi, overlapping 3-grams obtain the best result, and for Hindi, 4-prefixes yield the highest MAP. However, in combination with blind relevance feedback using 10 documents and 20 terms, 6-prefixes for English and 4-prefixes for Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR yield the highest MAP. Sub-word identification is a general case of decompounding. It results in one or more index terms for a single word form and increases the number of index terms but decreases their average length. The corresponding retrieval experiments show that relevance feedback on sub-words benefits from selecting a larger number of index terms in comparison with retrieval on word forms. Similarly, selecting the number of relevance feedback terms depending on the ratio of word vocabulary size to sub-word vocabulary size almost always slightly increases information retrieval effectiveness compared to using a fixed number of terms for different languages

Language contact and language decay. Socio-political and linguistic perspectives

The present linguistic situation in Malta is a reflection of historical and political permutations of the past. The simultaneous presence of two languages in Malta – generally described as a bilingual situation, but which in fact includes a number of features which can be defined more appropriately through diglossia – gives rise to a context wherein language contact is extremely frequent: this occurs through both inter- and intrasentential code-switching as well as through the constant integration of foreign terms, mainly from Italian and English, into Maltese. Language policies in Malta are frequently caught in the midst of these dynamic diachronic and synchronic linguistic processes and often operate on two fronts: on the one hand internal changes inherent to the Maltese language must be taken into consideration, on the other hand language use, characterized by the presence of both English and Maltese, also must be accounted for.peer-reviewe

Monitoring English Sandhi Linking – A Study of Polish Listeners’ L2 Perception

This paper presents a set of word monitoring experiments with Polish learners of English. Listeners heard short recordings of native English speech, and were instructed to respond when they recognized an English target word that had been presented on a computer screen. Owing to phonological considerations, we compared reaction times to two types of vowel-initial words, which had been produced either with glottalization, or had been joined via sandhi linking processes to the preceding word. Results showed that the effects of the glottalization as a boundary cue were less robust than expected. Implications of these findings for models of L2 speech are discussed. It is suggested that the prevalence of glottalization in L1 production makes listeners less sensitive to its effects as a boundary cue in L2