Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

The Acquisition Of English Vowel Contrasts By Brazilian Portuguese Speakers: A Study Of Brazilian Au Pairs In The U.S., Fernanda Lourenco Da Silva

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Previous research has shown that second language vowel acquisition is influenced by linguistic and experiential factors, particularly for contrasts that do not exist in the learner’s first language. The present study investigated the acquisition of English vowel contrasts by Brazilian Portuguese speakers in a naturalistic immersion context, focusing on the /ɛ–æ/ and /i–ɪ/ contrasts. A total of N = 11 Brazilian au pairs or former au pairs living in the United States participated in the study. Data were collected through a quasi-longitudinal framework with pre-arrival and post-arrival speech recordings, a perception task, and a social background questionnaire. Production was analyzed …

The Science Of Singing, Reed Blaylock

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

No abstract provided.

Research-Led Teaching Of State-Of-The-Art Laboratory Phonology: Intonation Atlases, Ingo Feldhausen

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

At the end of this talk you…

• have an idea of how undergraduate students of linguistics experience learning through research and inquiry into laboratory phonology in my university classes

• got to know a definition of "research-led teaching" • know the goals and method(s) behind the Interactive Atlas of (Spanish) Intonation, on which I based my research-led teaching projects

• know the different steps of how I implemented my research-led teaching project in advanced linguistics classes

• know how the scientific results of these projects were made accessible to the international linguistic community and how they are taken up …

From Study Design To Conference Presentation In One Semester: Introducing Students To The Research Process In Laboratory Phonology, Caroline Smith

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

The purpose of this presentation is todiscuss my experience of taking a class through the entireprocess of a laboratory phonology research study in a single semester, in fact, in about threemonths.

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …

Prosodylab-Aligner: A Tool For Forced Alignment Of Laboratory Speech, Kyle Gorman, Jonathan Howell, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Penn Forced Aligner automates the alignment process using the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). The core of Prosodylab-Aligner is align.py, a script which performs acoustic model training and alignment. This script automates calls to HTK and SoX, an open-source command-line tool which is capable of resampling audio. The included README file provides instructions for installing HTK and SoX on Linux and Mac OS X, and can also be run on Windows. During training, the model is initialized with flat-start monophones, which are then submitted to a single round of model estimation. Then, a tied-state 'small pause' model is inserted …

Second Occurrence Focus And The Acoustics Of Prominence, Jonathan Howell

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth‐conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb‐noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) …

Phonological Facilitation Through Translation In A Bilingual Picture-Naming Task, Paul Amrhein, Aimee Knupsky

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a critical examination of phonological effects in a picture-word interference task. Using a methodology minimizing stimulus repetition, English/Spanish and Spanish/English bilinguals named pictures in either L1 or L2 (blocked contexts) or in both (mixed contexts) while ignoring word distractors in L1 or L2. Distractors were either phonologically related to the picture name (direct; FISH–fist), or related through translation to the picture name (TT; LEG–milk–leche), or they were unrelated (bear–peach). Results demonstrate robust activation of phonological representations by translation equivalents of word distractors. Although both direct and TT distractors facilitated naming, TT facilitation was more consistent in L2 naming …