scholarly journals To Predict or to Memorize: Prominence in Inaugural Addresses

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Somers Clapp ◽  
Arto Anttila
Keyword(s):  
Regression Models ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
American English ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Inaugural Addresses ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Recent Account ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Successful Predictor

The assignment of phrasal prominence has been variously attributed to syntactic structure, part of speech, predictability, informativity, and speaker's intent. A recent account asserts that prominence is memorized on a by-word basis as Accent Ratio (AR), the likelihood that a word is accented (Nenkova et al. 2007). We examined whether AR outperforms the traditional predictors, in particular syntax and informativity, and if not, whether the traditional predictors shed light on the variance left unexplained by AR. We used a corpus of spoken American English consisting of the first inaugural addresses of six recent American presidents, hand-annotated for stress by two native English speakers. Regression models fitted to the data revealed that AR, syntax, and informativity all independently matter. Dividing the data into high-prominence and low-prominence tokens further revealed that AR and informativity are significant among low-prominence words, but only syntax is significant among high-prominence words. We conclude that although AR is a highly successful predictor, certain aspects of phrasal prominence require reference to syntax and informativity.

scholarly journals Where the action could be: Speakers look at graspable objects and meaningful scene regions when describing potential actions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwendolyn L Rehrig ◽  
Candace Elise Peacock ◽  
Taylor Hayes ◽  
Fernanda Ferreira ◽  
John M. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Attention ◽  
Real World ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
General Meaning ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Better Than

The world is visually complex, yet we can efficiently describe it by extracting the information that is most relevant to convey. How do the properties of real-world scenes help us decide where to look and what to say? Image salience has been the dominant explanation for what drives visual attention and production as we describe displays, but new evidence shows scene meaning predicts attention better than image salience. Here we investigated the relevance of one aspect of meaning, graspability (the grasping interactions objects in the scene afford), given that affordances have been implicated in both visual and linguistic processing. We quantified image salience, meaning, and graspability for real-world scenes. In three eyetracking experiments, native English speakers described possible actions that could be carried out in a scene. We hypothesized that graspability would preferentially guide attention due to its task-relevance. In two experiments using stimuli from a previous study, meaning explained visual attention better than graspability or salience did, and graspability explained attention better than salience. In a third experiment we quantified image salience, meaning, graspability, and reach-weighted graspability for scenes that depicted reachable spaces containing graspable objects. Graspability and meaning explained attention equally well in the third experiment, and both explained attention better than salience. We conclude that speakers use object graspability to allocate attention to plan descriptions when scenes depict graspable objects within reach, and otherwise rely more on general meaning. The results shed light on what aspects of meaning guide attention during scene viewing in language production tasks.

Intelligibility and attitudes

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-Ying Tan ◽  
Christina Castelli
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
American English ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
Inferiority Complex ◽  
Inner Circle

This paper investigates international responses to Singapore English (SgE), in terms of both intelligibility and attitudes toward the speaker, and compares it to responses to American English (AmE). It surveys 200 respondents from over 20 countries as they listen to a set of 15 sound recordings, including read SgE, spontaneous SgE, and read AmE. The results suggest that the intelligibility of SgE and AmE does differ between informants from different regions. However, the intelligibility of the test stimuli does not correlate simply to positive and negative attitudes. While SgE elicits generally positive attitudes, what is interesting is that the judgments of respondents from South-East Asia and East Asia are often more negative than those of English speakers of Inner Circle varieties. This seems to suggest not only an impenetrable mindset of these traditionally “non-native” English speakers, who seem to be still clamoring to speak an idealized “standard”, but also an inferiority complex over their own varieties of English.

The Semantic Features of “v+adv” in Native English Public Speaking Setting

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 1636
Author(s):  
Huijuan Wang ◽  
Yufeng Zou
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Business Elites ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Semantic Prosody

This paper explores and concludes the features and semantic prosodies of adverbs in public speaking setting by native English speakers through a corpus-driven approach. The corpus used is a sub-corpus (CES_C) from the self-built corpus (CES) comprising of 177 texts (type token) that are original and authentic speeches delivered by celebrities from UK and US. The speakers of these speeches are varied from all walks of life including presidents, business elites and etc. In terms of research methodology, this study is conducted both the quantitative approach of corpus linguistics and the qualitative approach of observation. By annotated part-of-speech (POS) with Treetagger tool, the study examined the occurrence frequency of adverbs and listed top 30 high-frequency adverbs employed in the corpus. Then different categories of adverbs were analyzed in terms of semantic function, and the frequency of occurrence was calculated respectively. The results shows the use of adverbs only accounts for 5% of all the words which is relatively lower than the use of other part of speech. Besides, some adverbs have certain semantic orientations based on different categorized adverbs, which provides intuitive reference resources for English public speaking teaching and learning in ESL/ EFL community. In addition, the combination of research focuses such as corpus, semantic prosody, public speaking and adverbs can be used as reference to enlarge the scope of corpus study and enhance the level of public speaking research.

ESL learners’ intra-speaker variability in producing American English tense and lax vowels

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Smith ◽  
Eric Johnson ◽  
Rachel Hayes-Harb
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Speaker Variability ◽  
Production Variability ◽  
Vowel Formants ◽  
Esl Learners

Abstract Nonnative (L2) English learners are often assumed to exhibit greater speech production variability than native (L1) speakers; however, support for this assumption is primarily limited to secondary observations rather than having been the specific focus of empirical investigations. The present study examined intra-speaker variability associated with L2 English learners’ tense and lax vowel productions to determine whether they showed comparable or greater intra-speaker variability than native English speakers. First and second formants of three tense/lax vowel pairs were measured, and Coefficient of Variation was calculated for 10 native speakers of American English and 30 nonnative speakers. The L2 speakers’ vowel formants were found to be native-like approximately half of the time. Whether their formants were native-like or not, however, they seldom showed greater intra-speaker variability than the L1 speakers.

scholarly journals The Effects of L2 Experience and Vowel Context on the Perceptual Assimilation of English Fricatives by L2 Thai Learners

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patchanok Kitikanan
Keyword(s):  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Sound System ◽  
Vowel Context ◽  
Thai Students ◽  
English Major ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Shed Light

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of vowel context and language experience in the perceived similarity between L2 English fricatives and Thai sounds. The target English sounds being investigated were the sounds /v, f, w, θ, tʰ, s, ð, d, z, ʃ, t͡ʃ/. These sounds were elicited from four native English speakers in words in onset position and followed by three vowel contexts: high, low and back. Subjects were 54 Thai students divided into two groups: English-major and non-English-major. These Thai learners were asked to identify the sounds they heard with the Thai sounds that were closest in their perception. The findings showed that 1) all shared sounds were matched with the same L1 categories, suggesting that the existence of L2 sounds in the L1 sound system supports the perception; 2) most non-shared sounds, except English /θ/ were matched to Thai sounds that were suggested in previous literature; 3) the perceived similarity of English /θ/ and the L1 Thai sounds showed the effect of the vowel context in that this sound was mostly matched with Thai /f/ in the high and low vowel contexts whereas in the back vowel context, it was matched with Thai /s/; 4) the perceived similarities of both shared and non-shared sounds were affected by vowel context and language experience. The findings of this study shed light on the importance exploring perceived similarities and differences in the phonetic level rather than the phonological one.

Grammatical number of English nouns in English Learners' Dictionaries

English Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao-Ling Zou ◽  
Ju-Lan Feng ◽  
Ya-Ping Zheng
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Unit Of Measurement ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Chinese And English

Chinese and English belong to different language families, so they often have different forms of expression. Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and has almost no number inflection. Plural meaning is usually implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by a bare noun, or is expressed through the plural marker 们 and the numerical adjectives such as many, numerous and each, as well as by quantifiers and reduplications. However, English nouns express number category by inflection as well as by quantifiers at times, so their grammatical number is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns. From the point of view of grammatical form, English nouns are often considered as countable and uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be directly modified by a numeral without unit specification, nor can they be combined with an indefinite article. Thus, cheese is quantified as three slices of cheese. However, uncountable nouns can also be quantified without specifying a unit of measurement, such as much coal. A number of uncountable nouns can be used in the plural form to mean ‘a large amount of’ as in the following example from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (hereinafter, LDCE) ‘The ship drifted into Turkish territorial waters’. In such cases, although water is uncountable, it has the plural form. In some cases, native English speakers can turn the theoretical uncountable nouns into countable ones (Landau, 2001). There seems to be no absolute boundary between countable and uncountable nouns.

The Bubble Noise Technique for Speech Perception Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 1653-1666
Author(s):  
Michael I. Mandel ◽  
Vikas Grover ◽  
Mengxuan Zhao ◽  
Jiyoung Choi ◽  
Valerie L. Shafer
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
American English ◽  
First Language ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Category Membership ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Lexical Tone ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
Perception Training

Purpose The “bubble noise” technique has recently been introduced as a method to identify the regions in time–frequency maps (i.e., spectrograms) of speech that are especially important for listeners in speech recognition. This technique identifies regions of “importance” that are specific to the speech stimulus and the listener, thus permitting these regions to be compared across different listener groups. For example, in cross-linguistic and second-language (L2) speech perception, this method identifies differences in regions of importance in accomplishing decisions of phoneme category membership. This research note describes the application of bubble noise to the study of language learning for 3 different language pairs: Hindi English bilinguals' perception of the /v/–/w/ contrast in American English, native English speakers' perception of the tense/lax contrast for Korean fricatives and affricates, and native English speakers' perception of Mandarin lexical tone. Conclusion We demonstrate that this technique provides insight on what information in the speech signal is important for native/first-language listeners compared to nonnative/L2 listeners. Furthermore, the method can be used to examine whether L2 speech perception training is effective in bringing the listener's attention to the important cues.

Semantic versus Syntactic Cues in Listening Comprehension

1985 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Listening Comprehension ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Semantic Level ◽  
Similar Difference ◽  
Syntactic Cues ◽  
Cloze Test

Studies have shown that less fluent non-native readers cannot make full use of semantic-level cues. Non-natives direct proportionately more attention than natives to syntactic and graphophonic information. This study asked whether a similar difference would be found between native and non-native listeners. Three groups were tested: native English-speakers and advanced and intermediate non-natives. After hearing a text, subjects were given a 55-item cloze test. It was hypothesized that with a subject's increased proficiency in the language, processing would show progressively greater attention to semantic than to syntactic or phonological cues. The cloze test was scored using a diagnostic scoring procedure developed by Clarke and Burdell (1977). Results confirmed the hypothesis. Semantically acceptable responses increased progressively for intermediate, advanced, and native groups, while responses based on syntactic structure decreased.

The Effects of Clear Speech on American English Listener Perception of Spanish-Accented and Native English Speech

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 1698-1709
Author(s):  
Alison Behrman ◽  
Sarah Hargus Ferguson ◽  
Peter Flom
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analog Scale ◽  
American English ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Clear Speech ◽  
Analog Scale ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
The Difference

Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore (a) the effect of clear speech on intelligibility, ease of understanding, and accentedness in Spanish-accented and native English speakers of American English and (b) the extent to which accentedness predicts intelligibility and ease of understanding. Method Ten adult talkers, five native English speakers and five native Spanish speakers, read aloud 28 short sentences in habitual speech and clear speech. One hundred monolingual English listeners transcribed what they heard and rated ease of understanding using a 10-cm visual analog scale while hearing the sentences in six-talker babble. Then, accentedness (using a visual analog scale) was judged in quiet. Intelligibility was calculated as the number of words transcribed correctly for each sentence. Ten listeners with significant exposure to Spanish-accented speech rated each talker. Each listener heard only one talker, rating half the sentences in clear speech and half in habitual speech, so that no listener heard a sentence more than once for the intelligibility and ease of understanding assessments. Results Clear speech improved intelligibility and ease of understanding for both language groups, with greater improvement in nonnative talkers. Clear speech did not alter accentedness in nonnative talkers but did increase accentedness in native talkers. Accentedness did not strongly predict intelligibility but did predict ease of understanding, although the relationship was nonlinear. Conclusions Listeners who are experienced in hearing Spanish-accented speech derive significant benefits from clear speech. The difference in the predictability of accentedness for intelligibility and ease of understanding contributes further evidence to the difference in underlying cognitive processes for these two variables.

scholarly journals Requests for Help in a Multilingual Professional Environment Testimonies and Actantial Models

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Lejot
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Complex Situation ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Multilingual Communication ◽  
Professional Environment ◽  
Linguistic Input ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractProfessional multilingual environments using English as a lingua franca are prone to imbalances in communication, linguistic insecurity and rising tension. Non-native English speakers develop avoidance strategies in order to lessen their apprehension. To overcome these imbalances, this research aims to understand the relationships formed around languages focusing on the dynamics of integration and the requests for help. Guided by the actantial models of Greimas (1966), this qualitative study employs semiolinguistics and discourse analysis, including 19 narrative interviews with employees of Airbus and UNESCO in Hamburg, Germany in 2013. This methodology draws on actors connected through relationships of power and/or collaboration. The actantial models applied seek linguistic input through designational paradigms, shifters and modal occurrences. The actantial models illustrate how a good language competence provides a better understanding of one’s direct as well as passive environment. The learning process is shown to be a conduit to integration. The actantial model and discourse analysis shed light on the complex situation of multilingual communication settings by highlighting the influence of individuals’ linguistic skills. As a matter of fact, depending on the role of each individual in a given situation, lending a helping hand sometimes equates to upsetting the balance.

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