Voice imitation - different ways of saying mobilsvar

Voice imitation can be effective in different ways, both consciously and unconsciously, in situations such as language acquisition and for entertainment. The human voice is flexible, and it is possible to change the vocal tract in order to imitate other people’s speech behaviour. To succeed with the imitation, we have to figure out important and characteristic features of the target speaker. Such features may be the dialect, the intonation pattern, the speech style, voice quality, as well as the pronunciation of sound segments. A professional impersonator, who reproduces another speaker’s voice and speech behaviour, has to be aware of how to change the vocal tract and get close to the voice of the target speaker. For an impersonator the aim of voice imitation is to entertain or cheat. He probably has to exaggerate some of the features of the target speaker’s speech behaviour, like a caricature, for it to be entertaining. One hypothesis is that if he is close to the target speaker in some critical features, he may yet fail with other less important features in his imitation and the audience will still have the impression of a successful voice imitation (Zetterholm 1997)

Impersonation - reproduction of speech

The present paper is a study of one impersonator and one of his voice imitations in order to find out how he changes his own voice and speech behaviour in order to get close to the target voice. Preliminary results from the auditory and the acoustic analysis, focusing on speech style and intonation pattern, will be presented

F-pattern Analysis of Professional Imitations of "hallå" in three Swedish Dialects

We describe preliminary results of an acoustic-phonetic study of voice imitations, which is ultimately aimed towards developing an explanatory approach to similar-sounding voices. Such voices are readily obtained by way of imitations, which were elicited by asking an adult-male, professional imitator to utter two tokens of the Swedish word “hallå” in a telephone-answering situation and three Swedish dialects (Gothenburg, Stockholm, Skania). Formant-frequency (F1, F2, F3, F4) patterns were measured at several landmarks of the main phonetic segments (‘a’, ‘l’, ‘å’), and cross-examined using the imitator’s token-averaged F-pattern and those obtained by imitation. The final ‘å’-segment seems to carry the bulk of differences across imitations, and between the imitator’s patterns and those of his imitations. There is however a notable constancy in F1 and F2 from the ‘a’-segment nearly to the end of the ‘l’-segment, where the imitator seems to have had fewer degrees of articulatory freedom

Rhythmic contrast between Swedish and Albanian as an explanation for L2-speech?

Based on observations of the rhythmic structure of L2-speech produced by L1-speakers of Albanian – which suggest the occurrence of transfer – a study is presented here that compares durational aspects between the two languages. In order to do this, speech read by Swedish and Albanian L1-speakers was recorded and investigated, and normalized durational factors were analysed. The results, however, do not support the assumption that there is variation in the rhythmic structure between the two languages. According to the results, transfer cannot explain previous observations

Uttalets plats i undervisningen av svenska som andraspråk

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A Switch of Dialect as Disguise

Criminals may purposely try to hide their identity by using a voice disguise such as imitating another dialect. This paper empirically investigates the power of dialect as an attribute that listeners use when identifying voices and how a switch of dialect affects voice identification. In order to delimit the magnitude of the perceptual significance of dialect and the possible impact of dialect imitation, a native bidialectal speaker was the target speaker in a set of four voice line-up experiments, two of which involved a dialect switch. Regardless of which dialect the bidialectal speaker spoke he was readily recognized. When the familiarization and target voices were of different dialects, it was found that the bidialectal speaker was significantly less well recognized. Dialect is thus a key feature for speaker identification that overrides many other features of the voice. Whether imitated dialect can be used for voice disguise to the same degree as native dialect switching demands further research

Arbete med skönlitteratur i svenskundervisningen - två lärarstudenter reflekterar

Antologien har blitt til i etterkant av en nordisk konferanse om morsmålsdidaktikk ved NTNU, Trondheim, i 2019. Konferansekomiteen var den samme som redaksjonen for denne antologien. Både konferansen og boka inngår i en rekke slike arrangement som går på omgang i morsmålsdidaktikkmiljøene i Norge, Sverige, Danmark og Finland. Det felles nordiske nettverket har navnet Nordisk nettverk for morsmålsdidaktisk forskning (NNMF).The aim is to study how subject teacher students reflect on fiction texts used in L1 (Swedish) lessons. The material consists of the students’ recorded pre- and post-reflections with their didactics supervisor during their practice in Sweden and Finland. The analyses show that the emphasis in the students’ reflections shifts from teaching as representation during the pre-reflection guidance to teaching as interaction and teaching as experience during post-reflection guidance.Syftet är att studera hur ämneslärarstudenter reflekterar över att arbeta med skönlitterära texter i L1-lektioner (svenska). Materialet består av inspelade handledningssamtal mellan studenterna och deras didaktikhandledare under praktikperioder i Sverige respektive Finland. Resultatet visar att tyngdpunkten i studenternas reflektioner förskjuts från undervisning som representation under förhandledningen till undervisning som samspel och undervisning som erfarenhet under efterhandledningen.Peer reviewe