Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Methods And Effects Of Shadowing Using Online Authentic Videos On L2 Acquisition Of Mandarin Chinese Tones, Ai-Ling Lu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mandarin Chinese tones are notoriously difficult for second language (L2) learners. Previous research focuses on tone training methods that can help learners produce monosyllabic lexical tones, and studies about the production of multisyllabic lexical tones at the sentence level in spontaneous speech are limited. This study applies shadowing—a method where the learners repeat what they heard with as little delay as possible—to tone training and compares the effects of using authentic videos and textbook audios as shadowing materials for beginner L2 Mandarin learners’ tone improvement at the sentence level. Fourteen students in elementary Chinese classes at an American university participated …

Singing And Pronunciation: A Review Of The Literature, Kassidy Joyner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Observed differences exist in the pronunciation abilities of individual language learners, especially adult learners. Musical ability and experience are possible factors that have been attributed to language pronunciation abilities. Although there has been a large amount of research concerning the effects of general musical ability and training on language abilities, very few studies have investigated the musical sub-category of singing. Research on the use of songs in the language classroom has largely tested the effects of song on vocabulary acquisition, while very few studies have explored the effects of song on pronunciation. Given that singing and pronunciation both use similar …

Cross-Dialectal Vowel Mapping And Glide Perception, Abram Clear

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Broadening our understandings of how the perceptual system accounts for dialectal vowel variation, this research investigates the perceptual mapping of Appalachian English (AE) monophthongal [aɪ]. I explore this mapping through the secondary perception of palatal glides in hiatus sequences of monophthongal [aɪ.a]. Formant transitions from a high front vowel to a non-high, non-front vowel mimic the formant signature of a canonical [j], resulting in the perception of an acoustic glide (Hogoboom 2020). I ask if listeners may still perceive a glide when canonical formant transitions are absent. If participants map monophthongal [aɪ] to a high front position, they might perceive …

Quantifying Dimensions Of The Vowel Space In Patients With Schizophrenia And Controls, Elizabeth Maneval

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The speech of patients with schizophrenia has been characterized as being aprosodic, or lacking pitch variation. Recent research on linguistic aspects of schizophrenia has looked at the vowel space to determine if there is some correlation between acoustic aspects of speech and patient status (Compton et al. 2018). Additional research by Hogoboom et al. (submitted) noted that measurements of Euclidean distance (ED), which is the average distance from the center of the vowel space to all vowels produced, and vowel density, which is the proportion of vowels clustered together in the center of the vowel space, were significantly correlated for …

Accessing The Gray Area Between Phonetics And Phonology: The Development Of Vowel Length As A Subphonemic Cue, Abby Fergus

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Previous research has shown that speakers of English use vowel length as a subphonemic cue to the voicing of a following obstruent. Countless studies have demonstrated adults’ ability to make a voicing judgement based upon vowel length but studies with children have provided mixed and sometimes conflicting results. In the present study, we sought to first determine whether adults would exhibit varying sensitivity to vowel length based upon whether it is found in a position where it is predictive of the phonemic status of another sound (i.e. serving as a subphonemic cue). Second, we removed top-down information in order to …

(Not) Speaking Spanish: Explicit Pronunciation Instruction In The Online High School Classroom, Brahm Vanwoerden

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Students in the language classroom often face a variety of challenges inherent to the process of learning a second language as an adult. These range from lack of sufficient motivation to structurally uninspired curriculum and are often amplified in the case of a drastic shift in environment. Such a shift took place rapidly over the course of 2020, transforming thousands of classrooms into virtual versions of themselves in a matter of weeks. Students began to receive vastly different quantities and types of language input and interacted with the language in substantially affected ways. Factors that previously played a large role …

Experienced And Inexperienced Listeners' Perception Of Childrens' /L/ Productions And Their Acoustic Correlates, Emily A. Coniglio

LSU Master's Theses

The phoneme /l/ is one of the highly misarticulated sounds for young children. Referrals for articulation are often based on a listener’s perception of the problem. The aim of the current study was to examine three listener groups’ perception of word-initial /l/ produced by young children to understand if level of experience with child speech impacts listeners’ perception on /l/. The three groups were separated based on their years of experience: speech-language pathologists with at least 10 years of experience (SLP group), graduate students in speech-language pathology (GS group), and naive listeners with no clinical phonetics experience (NL group). Specifically, …

Spe-29 - Voice & Articulation (Intro Assignment), Laura Spinu

Open Educational Resources

This assignment is asking students to collaboratively create a database of "good" and "bad" voices for subsequent analysis.

Spe-29 - Voice & Articulation (Advanced Assignment), Laura Spinu

Open Educational Resources

This two-part assignment introduces students to spectrogram reading by asking them (1) to explore a set of spectrograms representing the days of the week, and then (2) record their own spectrogram and add a picture of it to a common "Mystery Spectrograms" folder for use in a subsequent assignment (and also in classroom activities).

NOTE: by the time this assignment is introduced, the students have already learned how to record themselves and save sound files using the Praat software for acoustic analysis. If they are not familiar with the procedure, this tutorial will help:

Making a recording in PRAAT

Prosody And Intonation In Formosan Languages, Benjamin K. Macaulay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Formosan languages are the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. These languages are part of the Austronesian language family, and represent all but one primary branch of this family of 1,200+ languages. The Formosan languages are endangered, some critically so. While these languages have seen attention in the literature for their syntactic and phonological systems, little work has been done on their prosodic structure or intonation.

This dissertation analyzes the prosodic structure and intonational phonology of Mantauran Rukai, Budai Rukai, Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, Sandimen Paiwan, Piuma Paiwan, Kavalan, Amis, Bunun, Tgdaya Seediq, Truku Seediq, and Pazeh, based on …

The Pre-Nasal Allophonic Splitting Of /Ɛ/ In Toronto Heritage Cantonese, Holman Tse

English Faculty Scholarship

Muysken (2019) has argued that the most convincing cases of contact-induced change in heritage languages involve the dominant language having two distinctions mapping on to one (2-to-1). Evidence of such a case from Toronto heritage Cantonese will be discussed. Toronto English (the dominant language) has an allophonic split in which the TRAP vowel is raised and fronted in pre-nasal contexts. This is argued to influence the development of a similar allophonic split, led by lower proficiency speakers, in which Cantonese /ɛ/ is fronted before nasal consonants. The lack of an /ɛ/ split in Hong Kong Cantonese provides further support for …

Information Flow, Artificial Phonology And Typology, Adamantios Gafos

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In the context Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) experiments, it is possible to quantify how effectively a stimulus has conveyed information and specifically the information the experimenter thinks it was designed to convey. At the most basic level, this can be done if one has access to the response variability of independent responses to the same stimulus (or subparts of the stimulus). The variability of these responses serves as an index of the amount of information that flows from the source of the stimulus to the perceiver. Quantifying information flow in this way, it is shown that under conditions where participants …

Learnability Of Indexed Constraint Analyses Of Phonological Opacity, Aleksei Nazarov

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper explores the learnability of indexed constraint (Pater, 2000) analyses of opacity based on the case study of raising in Canadian English (Chomsky, 1964; Chambers, 1973). Such analyses, while avoiding multiple levels of derivation or representation, require the learner to induce indexed constraints, connect these constraints to particular segments in the lexicon, and rank these constraints. An implementation of Round’s (2017) learner for indexed constraints, which is an extension of Biased Constraint Demotion (Prince and Tesar, 2004), is used here to test whether a simple learner can rise to this challenge and learn a restrictive analysis of the opaque …

Learning Interactions Of Local And Non-Local Phonotactic Constraints From Positive Input, Aniello De Santo, Alëna Aksënova

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper proposes a grammatical inference algorithm to learn input-sensitive tier-based strictly local languages across multiple tiers from positive data only, when the locality of the tier-constraints and the tier-projection function is set to 2 (MITSL; De Santo and Graf, 2019). We conduct simulations showing that the algorithm succeeds in learning MITSL patterns over a set of artificial languages.

Consonant Harmony, Disharmony, Memory And Time Scales, Adamantios Gafos

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

I argue that properties of memory offer an appropriate grounding for a number of characteristics of long distance consonantal co-occurrence restrictions whose basis had so far remained unclear.

The Influence Of Socioindexical Information On The Speech Perception-Production Link: Evidence From A Shadowing Task, Kyler B. Laycock

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The body of work on speech perception demonstrates the ability of listeners to utilize both visual and acoustic information in their processing of a given speech signal. More recent studies have established that listeners are sensitive to cues in both these modalities which inform their perception of a speaker's identity in parallel with the linguistic message, but the relationship between social information in perception and production together is unclear. This study reports the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that expectations about a speakers identity is able to influence a listener's perception and production of speech in …

Language Contact And Covert Prominence In The Sḥerēt-Jibbāli Language Of Oman, Jarred Brewster

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis reports on a phonetic production study, the results of which support the existence of a complex word-prosodic system for the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli language of Dhofar, Oman. In the language, stress seems to co-occur in some lexical items with a high tone. In the discussion, a mechanism for the emergence of this system is proposed as the reflex of a typological feature held in common with the related language, Soqotri, and as justification for an Eastern Modern South Arabian subgroup consisting of Sḥerēt-Jibbāli and Soqotri.

Emergent Typological Effects Of Agent-Based Learning Models In Maximum Entropy Grammar, Coral Hughto

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how a theory of grammatical representations and a theory of learning can be combined to generate gradient typological predictions in phonology, predicting not only which patterns are expected to exist, but also their relative frequencies: patterns which are learned more easily are predicted to be more typologically frequent than those which are more difficult.

In Chapter 1 I motivate and describe the specific implementation of this methodology in this dissertation. Maximum Entropy grammar (Goldwater & Johnson 2003) is combined with two agent-based learning models, the iterated and the interactive learning model, each of which mimics a type …

The Sounds Of Sikles Gurung: A Phonetic And Phonological Description Of A Tibeto-Burman Language Of Nepal, Danielle Ronkos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation describes the sound system of the Sikles variety of Gurung, or Tamu Kyui, a Tibeto-Burman minority language of Nepal. Drawing on data collected with the help of Sikles Gurung speakers living in Nepal and New York between 2014 and 2018, it presents evidence that the phonetics and phonology of this variety differ from descriptions of other varieties. Major findings include contrastive vowel duration, a 2-category register system rather than the 4-tone system reported for other varieties, and allophonic secondary consonant articulations assigned by the backness of adjacent vowels and glides. The secondary articulation system is linked to the …

Cot In The Act: Ethnicity And Age Affects Phonemic Perception Of The Low-Back Merger In New York City English, Omar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

This paper is an experimental study on how perceptions about a speaker’s age and ethnicity may influence whether listeners perceive the THOUGHT / LOT distinction. The macro-categories of age and ethnicity have been found to correlate with the lowering of raised THOUGHT (Wong 2012, Becker 2010) and the favoring of the merged vowels in perception (Haddican et al. 2016). This thesis examines whether images of faces associated with different age and ethnicity categories condition perception of auditory stimuli as belonging to either the LOT or THOUGHT class. This thesis builds on previous results suggesting that non-linguistic information influences speech …