Imitation of the Russian accent by Czech speakers

(in English) Foreign accent imitation is one of the strategies used in intentional voice disguise. This thesis focuses on imitation of the Russian accent in Czech language by Czech speakers and describes the imitated accent based on auditory and acoustic analysis. Both segmental and suprasegmental features of speech have been analysed based on the comparison of audio recordings of regular speech and speech with imitated Russian accent. The most frequent difference implemented by Czech speakers during the imitation task involved the change of duration of vowels in relation to the position of word stress and included both lengthening of stressed vowels and shortening of unstressed ones. Change of vowel quality has been performed mostly on the vowel [ɪ], resulting in a close vowel [i] or resembling [ɨ]. Consonantal deviations usually concerned Czech sounds [ɦ] and [r̝ ], and palatalization of lateral consonant [l]. Audio recordings of Czech imitators as well as Russian speakers were used in the perception test, in which participants had to judge the authenticity of foreign accent. Four out of ten imitators were rated by the majority of listeners as genuine non-native speakers, whereas two out of five Russian speakers were misjudged for imitators. The accent of successful imitators was characterised by...(česky) Jednou z používaných strategií maskování hlasu je imitace cizineckého přízvuku. Tato práce se zaměřuje na napodobování ruského přízvuku v češtině českými mluvčími a popisuje imitovaný přízvuk na základě poslechové a akustické analýzy. Na základě porovnání běžného projevu mluvčích a projevu s imitovaným ruským přízvukem byly analyzovány jak segmentální, tak i suprasegmentální jevy. Nejfrekventovanějším rozdílem mezi projevy byla změna trvání samohlásek v souvislosti s realizací slovního přízvuku, která se týkala jednak dloužení přízvučných vokálů, jednak krácení nepřízvučných vokálů. Kvalitativním změnám podlehla především samohláska [ɪ], místo níž bylo vyslovené zavřené [i], nebo se její artikulace blížila vokálu [ɨ]. Konsonantické odchylky zahrnovaly odlišnou výslovnost českých hlásek [ɦ] a [r̝ ] a palatalizaci laterálního konsonantu [l]. Zvukové nahrávky rodilých mluvčích češtiny imitujících ruský přízvuk a rodilých mluvčích ruštiny byly použity v percepčním testu, v němž posluchači posuzovali autenticitu cizineckého přízvuku. Čtyři z deseti imitátorů byli většinou posluchačů ohodnoceni jako autentičtí nerodilí mluvčí, zatímco dva z pěti ruských mluvčích byli chybně označeni za imitátory. Přízvuk úspěšných imitátorů se ve srovnání s ostatními mluvčími vyznačoval výrazně větším množstvím...Fonetický ústavInstitute of PhoneticsFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

A Model of Prenatal Acquisition of Vowels

Humans learn much about their language while still in thewomb. Prenatal exposure has been repeatedly shown to affectnewborn infants’ processing of the prosodic characteristics ofnative language speech. Little is known about whether and howprenatal exposure affects infants’ perception of speech soundsegments. Here we simulated prenatal learning of vowels intwo virtual fetuses whose mothers spoke (slightly) differentlanguages. The learners were two-layer neural networks andwere each exposed to vowel tokens sampled from an existentfive-vowel language (Spanish and Czech, respectively). Theinput acoustic properties approximated the speech signal thatcould possibly be heard in the intrauterine environment, andthe learners’ auditory system was relatively immature. Withoutsupervision, the virtual fetuses came to warp the continuousacoustic signal into “proto-categories” that were specific totheir linguistic environment. Both learners came to create twocategorization patterns and did so in language-specific ways,primarily on the basis of the vowels’ first-formantcharacteristics. Such prenatally formed proto-categories werenot adult-like in that they entirely collapsed some of the native-language contrasts. At the same time, the categories reflectedfeatures of the adult language in that they were language-specific. These results can inspire future work on speech andlanguage acquisition in real young humans

Typology of mistakes made by Russian-speaking foreign students in written communication

The bachelor thesis deals with the typology of interference errors of students, whose native language is Russian, and analyses the texts of respondents who have achieved B1and B2 level according to the CEFR which are available online in MERLIN corpus. After a brief introduction to the issue of interlingual interference and an overview of the selected differences between Czech and Russian, which are the source of interference errors, the results of the error analysis are presented. Errors are divided into categories and classified by the frequency of occurrence, and statistical data are compared between B1 and B2 level respectively

Imitation of the Russian accent by Czech speakers

(in English) Foreign accent imitation is one of the strategies used in intentional voice disguise. This thesis focuses on imitation of the Russian accent in Czech language by Czech speakers and describes the imitated accent based on auditory and acoustic analysis. Both segmental and suprasegmental features of speech have been analysed based on the comparison of audio recordings of regular speech and speech with imitated Russian accent. The most frequent difference implemented by Czech speakers during the imitation task involved the change of duration of vowels in relation to the position of word stress and included both lengthening of stressed vowels and shortening of unstressed ones. Change of vowel quality has been performed mostly on the vowel [ɪ], resulting in a close vowel [i] or resembling [ɨ]. Consonantal deviations usually concerned Czech sounds [ɦ] and [r̝ ], and palatalization of lateral consonant [l]. Audio recordings of Czech imitators as well as Russian speakers were used in the perception test, in which participants had to judge the authenticity of foreign accent. Four out of ten imitators were rated by the majority of listeners as genuine non-native speakers, whereas two out of five Russian speakers were misjudged for imitators. The accent of successful imitators was characterised by..

Neural processing of spectral and durational changes in speech and non-speech stimuli: an MMN study with Czech adults

Neural discrimination of auditory contrasts is usually studied via the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potentials (ERPs). In the processing of speech contrasts, the magnitude of MMN is determined by both the acoustic as well as the phonological distance between stimuli. Also, the MMN can be modulated by the order in which the stimuli are presented, thus indexing perceptual asymmetries in speech sound processing. Here we assessed the MMN elicited by two types of phonological contrasts, namely vowel quality and vowel length, assuming that both will elicit a comparably strong MMN as both are phonemic in the listeners’ native language (Czech) and perceptually salient. Furthermore, we tested whether these phonemic contrasts are processed asymmetrically, and whether the asymmetries are acoustically or linguistically conditioned. The MMN elicited by the spectral change between /a/ and /ε/ was comparable to the MMN elicited by the durational change between /ε/ and /ε:/, suggesting that both types of contrasts are perceptually important for Czech listeners. The spectral change in vowels yielded an asymmetrical pattern manifested by a larger MMN response to the change from /ε/ to /a/ than from /a/ to /ε/. The lack of such an asymmetry in the MMN to the same spectral change in comparable non-speech stimuli spoke against an acoustically-based explanation, indicating that it may instead have been the phonological properties of the vowels that triggered the asymmetry. The potential phonological origins of the asymmetry are discussed within the featurally underspecified lexicon (FUL) framework, and conclusions are drawn about the perceptual relevance of the place and height features for the Czech /ε/-/a/ contrast

Tuning in to a novel language is easier without orthography

Tuning into a novel language is a particularly difficult task for many adults. While the rhythmic and melodic patterns, i.e. prosody, bootstrap language acquisition in infancy, they are considerably challenging to learn in adulthood. Is it because of an age-related decline of the language-learning ability or because of unfavourable learning conditions? We investigated whether adults can auditorily sensitise to the prosody of a novel language, and whether such sensitisation is affected by concurrent presentation of alphabetic transcription. After 5 minutes of exposure to Māori, Czech listeners could reliably recognize this language in a post-test using low-pass filtered clips of Māori and Malay recorded by new speakers. Recognition accuracy was lower for participants exposed to the novel-language speech along with deep-orthography transcriptions or shallow orthography with unfamiliar characters. Adults can thus attune to novel-language prosody, but orthography hampers this ability. This has implications for language acquisition theories and learning practice