Search results for " Phonetics"
showing 10 items of 30 documents
Prominence and centralization: a two-way contrast between lexical and epenthetic non-labial high vowels in Algherese Catalan
2015
Algherese Catalan has the peculiarity of presenting an inserted [i] vowel across words in order to avoid certain consonant codas. In this study, we compare five acoustic features of this epenthetic segment (i.e., duration, intensity, and the three first formants) with those of lexical /i/ vowels, both stressed and unstressed. The results indicate that the three vowels present differences only with respect to duration, F2 and, to a lesser extent, F3. The second formant values decline progressively from the lexical stressed vowels to the inserted unstressed segments, with lexical unstressed segments at an intermediate point. This gradation mirrors the relative prominence of each vowel. The di…
Technology-Enhanced Course in English Theoretical Grammar and Phonetics at the Tertiary Level
2021
The advancement of technologies and the recently forced lockdown by Covid-19 are bringing changes to the organisation of the learning process by accelerating the introduction of e-learning to create a learner-centred technology-based approach to English studies, thus stepping towards digital humanities. These trends initiated the institutional project Mobile and Desktop Software Integration in Bachelor and Master Study Programmes. The present study, using a questionnaire, elicits university students’ attitudes to the mobile applications and speech analysis software-based seminar activities in Moodle e-course in accordance with the blended learning model selected for the studies of theoretic…
Perception et traque de “l'accent etranger” : la production des voyelles orales en fle par des polonophones
2017
Our research fits in the overall framework of French as a Foreign Language oral teaching methods and focuses will deal with the phenomenon of “foreign accent”, those marks that reveal in transparency the presence of the phonological sieve of the mother tongue, and we will focus on the pronunciation of oral vowels in French by Polish-speaking learners. A preliminary study, descriptive and contrastive, of the phonological systems of Polish and French will allow us to make assumptions about perceptible interferences in the pronunciation of spoken French which might be at the origin of noise in the psycholinguistic decoding. Acoustic analyses of speech corpuses, based on the previous hypotheses…
IL "SICULO-ARABIC" E GLI ARABISMI MEDIEVALI E MODERNI DI SICLIA
2013
IL «SICULO ARABIC» E GLI ARABISMI SICILIANI MEDIEVALI E MODERNI Nell’ambito degli studi sulla vicenda storico-linguistica del periodo arabo-normanno in Sicilia, il saggio di Agius (1996), dal titolo Siculo Arabic, richiama l’attenzione sul Trattato di Ibn Makkī detto “il Mazarese”, rientrante nel filone dei “laḥn works”. Si tratta di opere volte a segnalare e correggere gli errori ricorrenti tra gli utenti delle diverse varietà di arabo, errori intesi come devianze dal modello classico. La possibilità di disporre di una discreta quantità di dati presumibilmente “siciliani” (dati “interferiti” e “sgrammaticati” possibilmente riconducibili a una “varietà ponte” tra l’arabo e gli arabismi dial…
On stress production in whispered Finnish
1987
We have compared sentence stress production in normal phonation and whisper in two native speakers of Finnish using acoustical analysis, esophageal pressure measurements and electromyography. The average peak values of the fundamental frequency, intensity, esophageal pressure and the EMG recordings from the thyroarytenoid and cricothyroid muscles were measured and their intercorrelations were calculated. In normal speech the cricothyroid activity and the subglottal pressure showed a significant correlation with the peak values of the acoustical indicators of stress for both subjects. The thyroarytenoid muscle showed a statistically significant correlation with the fundamental frequency for …
The Neural Correlates of Grammatical Gender: An fMRI Investigation
2002
Abstract In an fMRI experiment, subjects saw a written noun and made three distinct decisions in separate sessions: Is its grammatical gender masculine or feminine (grammatical feature task)? Is it an animal or an artifact (semantic task)? Does it contain a /tch/ or a /k/ sound (phonological task)? Relative to the other experimental conditions, the grammatical feature task activated areas of the left middle and inferior frontal gyrus and of the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus. These activations fit in well with neuropsychological studies that document the correlation between left frontal lesions and damage to morphological processes in agrammatism, and the correlation between left t…
On the sociolinguistic typology of linguistic complexity loss
2012
Published version of an article in the journal: Language Documentation & Conservation. Also available from the publisher at: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4521 Open access. The nature of the human language faculty is the same the world over, and has been so ever since humans became human. This paper, however, considers the possibility that, because of the influence which social structure can have on language structure, this common faculty may produce structurally different types of language under different sociolinguistic conditions. Changing sociolinguistic conditions in the modern world are likely to have the consequence that, in time, the only languages remaining in the world will be sever…
Measures of native and non-native rhythm in a quantity language.
2005
The traditional phonetic classification of language rhythm as stress-timed or syllable-timed is attributed to Pike. Recently, two different proposals have been offered for describing the rhythmic structure of languages from acoustic-phonetic measurements. Ramus has suggested a metric based on the proportion of vocalic intervals and the variability ( SD) of consonantal intervals. Grabe has proposed Pairwise Variability Indices (nPVI, rPVI) calculated from the differences in vocalic and consonantal durations between successive syllables. We have calculated both the Ramus and Grabe metrics for Latvian, traditionally considered a syllable rhythm language, and for Latvian as spoken by Russian l…
Quantity language speakers show enhanced subcortical processing
2016
Abstract The complex auditory brainstem response (cABR) can reflect language-based plasticity in subcortical stages of auditory processing. It is sensitive to differences between language groups as well as stimulus properties, e.g. intensity or frequency. It is also sensitive to the synchronicity of the neural population stimulated by sound, which results in increased amplitude of wave V. Finnish is a full-fledged quantity language, in which word meaning is dependent upon duration of the vowels and consonants. Previous studies have shown that Finnish speakers have enhanced behavioural sound duration discrimination ability and larger cortical mismatch negativity (MMN) to duration change comp…
Acoustic properties and perception of minimal contrasts in Valencian Catalan sibilants
2017
El valencià estàndard presenta tres consonants fricatives sibilants: /s/, /z/ i /S/.Mentre que el contrast entre /z/ i /s/ sembla indiscutible, l’existència d’unaoposició real entre /S/ i /s/ és més dubtosa. El primer objectiu d’aquest treball éscomprovar si, en un estil de parla hiperarticulat (Fonet, Gonzàlvez et al., 2007), laconsonant /s/ és diferent de /z/ i de /S/ tenint en compte set paràmetres acústics:durada, harmonicitat, pic espectral i quatre moments espectrals: centre de gravetat,desviació estàndard, asimetria i curtosi. Les dades revelen que /z/ i /s/ contrastenclarament en durada, harmonicitat i asimetria; /S/ i /s/ contrasten en harmonicitat,desviació estàndard, curtosi i, e…