Acoustic and perceptual correlates of Vietnamese folk poetry rhythmic structure

This paper reports a study on the acoustic realization and the perception of the rhythmic structure of Vietnamese folk poetry. Ten speakers of Sài Gòn dialect recite four folk poems that were made up of three-word, five-word, six-word, seven-word, and eightword lines. The acoustic analysis showed that the duration and intensity results mirror each other in indicating a strong iambic pattern of prominence, supporting the literature that a line of folk verse with even number of syllables tend to have a series of iambs and when there is an odd number of syllables, the line usually ends with an iamb, not an anapaest (Durand and Nguyễn, 1985Fhe perception results showed that listeners relied on duration cues in judging the rhythmic patterns of the poetic lines while intensity was not used. Also, majority of listeners were not finely tuned to these acoustic cues and only a few listeners could detect them in parsing the poetic lines into detail bi-syllabic iambic units.Australian National Universit

Adult L2 Japanese learners’ production and perception of Vietnamese monophthong vowels

This paper reports a study that investigated the role of prior native or first language (L1) phonological and phonetic learning on the integration of vowel quality features in the acquisition of second language (L2) vowels by examining adult L2 Japanese learners’ perception and production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels in an identification, an imitation and a read aloud tasks. Two groups of participants took part in the study (11 control Vietnamese, 10 Japanese learners of Vietnamese).  The stimuli consisted of 9 Vietnamese monophthongs /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u, ɤ, ɯ/ and 5 simple Japanese vowels /i, e, a, o, ɯ/. The results showed that Japanese learners of Vietnamese failed to distinguish the Vietnamese vowel pairs /ɛ/-/e/, /o/-/ɔ/ and /u/-/ɯ/ accurately in their perception. In terms of production, Vietnamese vowels /ɛ/ and /e/ merged in vowel space. Moreover, the three Vietnamese vowels /ɔ/, /o/ and/ɤ/ produced by Japanese learners in both production tasks tend to cluster together. Vietnamese vowels /u/ and /ɯ/ produced by Japanese learners also overlapped in vowel space. In general, the findings of this study showed that Japanese learners transfer their L1 vowel quality features into the production of Vietnamese vowels.

Acoustic Correlates of Statement and Question Intonation in Southern Vietnamese

This paper reports a study that investigated the acoustic correlates of the intonation patterns of statements versus various kinds of questions in Southern Vietnamese. Sentences identical in segmental make-up and lexical tone were elicited in nine different contexts: (1) statements, (2) Yes-No questions without particles, (3) Yes-No questions with the particle không, (4) questions with the particle ư (5) alternative questions with the particle hay ‘or’, (6 and 7) Wh-questions with the particles ai (who) and chừng nào ‘when’ at the beginning, and (8 and 9) Wh-questions with particles cho ai ‘for whom’ and hồi nào ‘when’ at the end. Twenty speakers (9 males and 11 females) from Hồ Chí Minh City participated in the study. The results show that there are a number of acoustic strategies for realizing the difference between declaratives and the interrogatives in Southern Vietnamese: global F0, speech tempo, intensity and local sentence-final F0. The results of this investigation contribute to the study of Vietnamese prosody, cross-language and cross-dialectal prosodic comparison

The acquisition of question intonation by Vietnamese learners of English

Abstract This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question, (2) evaluating which characteristics of the L2 English intonation can be clearly derived from the observation of the data, and (3) whether the L2 English intonation patterns are transferred from Vietnamese. A data set of 25 sentences that included 5 statements and 20 information-seeking questions were constructed. Ten native Australian English speakers as a control group and 20 Southern Vietnamese speakers of English (10 beginners and 10 advanced speakers) were recorded. The final tunes (the direction of the final F0 contours) of the sentences were analysed. The result showed that while the advanced speakers of English mostly produced intonation patterns that are typically used by native English speakers, beginning speakers of English used a variety of tunes, several of which are deviate from the native-like standard and clearly transferred from the tone contours in Vietnamese. The findings of this study have an original and significant contribution to the literature because it investigated into the prosodic transfer of intonation patterns between two typologically distinct languages: English, a stress accent language and Vietnamese, a contrastive contour tone language and has implications for intonation teaching

L1 Korean vocalic transfer in adult L2 Korean learners’ production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels

Abstract This paper reports a study that investigated the role of prior native or first language (L1) phonological and phonetic learning on the integration of vowel quality features in the production of second language (L2) vowels by examining adult L2 Korean learners’ production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels in an imitation and a read aloud tasks. Three groups of participants took part in the study (11 control Vietnamese, 11 Korean learners of Vietnamese, and 10 control Korean). The stimuli consisted of 9 Vietnamese monophthongs /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u, ɤ, ɯ/ and 8 Standard Korean vowels / i, ɛ, e, a, o, u, ʌ, ɨ /. The results showed that Vietnamese vowels /ɛ/ and /e/ produced by Korean learners merged in vowel space, proving how a phonemic merger in L1 can influence speakers’ perception and production of non-native vowels. Moreover, the three Vietnamese vowels /ɔ/, /o/ and/ ɤ/ produced by Korean learners in both tasks tend to cluster together. In general, the findings of this study showed that Korean learners transfer their L1 vowel quality features into the production of Vietnamese vowels