Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Phonological Profiles Of 2-Year-Olds With Expressive-Only And Expressive And Receptive Language Delay: A Pilot Study, Kristin Vanwyngaarden, Shari L. Deveney

Special Education and Communication Disorders Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This poster discusses: Background, Research Question, Methods, Results, Conclusions, Clinical Implications, and Limitations & Future Directions.

Teaching Pronunciation: Is Explicit Phonetics Instruction Beneficial For Fl Learners?, Elizabeth M. Kissling

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Pronunciation instruction has been shown to improve learners’ L2 accent in some, though certainly not all, cases. A core component of traditional pronunciation instruction is explicit lessons in L2 phonetics. Studies suggest that Spanish FL learners improve their pronunciation after receiving instruction, but the effect of phonetics instruction has not been directly compared with other pedagogical alternatives. This study reports on the pronunciation gains that first, second, and third year learners (n = 95) made after receiving either explicit instruction in Spanish phonetics or a more implicit treatment with similar input, practice, and feedback. The target phones included a …

Accent In Uspanteko, Ryan Bennett, Robert Henderson

English Faculty Research Publications

Uspanteko (Guatemala; ∼2000 speakers) is an endangered K’ichean-branch Mayan language. It is unique among the K’ichean languages in having innovated a system of contrastive pitch accent, which operates alongside a separate system of non-contrastive stress. The prosody of Uspanteko is of general typological interest, given the relative scarcity of ‘mixed’ languages employing both stress and lexical pitch. Drawing from a descriptive grammar and from our own fieldwork, we also document some intricate interactions between pitch accent and other aspects of the phonology (stress placement, vowel length, vowel quality, and two deletion processes). While pitch accent is closely tied to morphology, …

Pedagogía De Hablantes De Herencia: Implicaciones Para El Entrenamiento De Instructores Al Nivel Universitario, Lina M. Reznicek-Parrado

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study researches the differences in pedagogical needs between learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language (FL learners) and learners of Spanish as a Heritage Language (HL learners) at the university level. By using the UNL Modern Languages and Literatures Department as an illustrative case and based on an analysis of the Heritage Language student profile in the context of the United States, this study seeks to explore arguments in favor of providing training for university-level instructors of Spanish that responds to the specific pedagogical needs of Heritage Language Learners.

The relevancy of this study is not only based on …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Phonological Parameters Of Indigenous And Asl Country Name-Signs, Carolyn J. Stephens

Journal of Interpretation

This investigation was guided by the following research questions: What are the American Sign Language (ASL) and indigenous signs for each country in the world? What phonological features do they exhibit? Are these features consistent with previous research on ASL? The research presented in this article is the result of a project that provides a comprehensive online compilation of country-name signs. A website was created to display both written descriptions and videos of the signs, and 180 countries with 314 total variations were identified, documented, recorded, coded and analyzed. A thorough literature review was conducted and an analysis of phonological …

[Sabbatical Report], Elizabeth Winkler

Sabbatical Reports

I am working to develop a English-Kpelle dictionary database for use in the electronic world as well as various paper dictionaries to be published and used primarily in Liberia. I input over 2200 entries into a database. Entries include information about pronunciation, meaning, grammar, spelling, etymology and related words. This database will be uploaded to the website as well as formatted for paper publication of the dictionaries.

Phonological Adaptations Of English Loanwords In Turkish, Rachel Beel, Jennifer Felder

Other Undergraduate Scholarship

When trying to understand the phonological system of a language (the sounds used in speech), what are some of the ways to figure out the patterns of an unfamiliar language? The way that borrowed or loanwords (words taken from one language and used in another) are pronounced in a language reveals much about the language’s phonology. The phonological system of Turkish has accommodated for starkly different syllable structures when incorporating modern English words into this contrasting language.

A personal survey of Turkish syllable structure has revealed how native speakers of Turkish cope with the phonological features of borrowed English words …

Shiwilu (Jebero), Pilar Valenzuela, Carlos Gussenhoven

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W. The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor- Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged …