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The Interaction Of Domain-Initial Effects With Lexical Stress: Acoustic Data From English, Spanish, And Portuguese, Ricardo F. Napoleão De Souza
The Interaction Of Domain-Initial Effects With Lexical Stress: Acoustic Data From English, Spanish, And Portuguese, Ricardo F. Napoleão De Souza
Linguistics ETDs
The phonetic implementation of domain-initial boundaries has gained considerable attention in the literature. However, most studies of the phenomenon have investigated small samples of articulatory data in which target syllables were lexically prominent and/or phrasally accented, introducing important potential confounds. This dissertation tackles these issues by examining how domain-initial effects operate on the acoustic properties of fully unstressed word-initial CV syllables in phrasally unaccented words. Similar materials were designed for a reading task in which 14 speakers of English, Spanish and Portuguese, languages that differ in how lexical prominence affects segmental makeup, took part. Results from the acoustic analyses show …
Cuasi Nomás Inglés: Prosody At The Crossroads Of Spanish And English In 20th Century New Mexico, Jackelyn Van Buren
Cuasi Nomás Inglés: Prosody At The Crossroads Of Spanish And English In 20th Century New Mexico, Jackelyn Van Buren
Linguistics ETDs
This dissertation investigates prosodic change in the long-term language contact setting of Traditional New Mexican Spanish (NMS). NMS prosody is perceptually distinct from other contemporary varieties of Spanish (Hills 1906, Bowen 1952, Lipski 2011), yet the features which make it unique have not been acoustically examined. This study hypothesizes that bilingualism with English has affected NMS prosody and analyzes three features which are known to differ between Spanish and English and therefore provide a quantitative point of comparison: pitch peak alignment, pitch variability, and rhythmic timing. These variables have been demonstrated to be susceptible to transfer in contact situations, including …
Esl Speakers' Production Of English Lexical Stress: The Effect Of Variation In Acoustic Correlates On Perceived Intelligibility And Nativeness, Paul Edmunds
Linguistics ETDs
Non-native speakers of English often experience problems in pronunciation as they are learning English, many such problems persisting even when the speaker has achieved a high degree of fluency. Research has shown that for a non-native speaker to sound most natural and intelligible in his or her second language, the speaker must acquire proper prosody, such as native-like speech rhythms (Tajima et al., 1997; Wenk, 1985; Wennerstrom, 2001). This dissertation investigates how native English and Spanish ESL (English as a Second Language) speakers compare in their production of three acoustic correlates of lexical stress in English, namely the relative durations …