scholarly journals Duration as a Phonetic Cue in Native and Non‑Native American English

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Biljana Čubrović
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
American English ◽  
Spectral Characteristics ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
The Us ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Phonetic Duration

This vowel study looks at the intricate relationship between spectral  characteristics and vowel duration in the context of American English vowels, both from a native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) perspective. The non-native speaker cohort is  homogeneous in the sense that all speakers have Serbian as their mother tongue, but have been long-time residents of the US. The phonetic context investigated in this study is /bVt/, where V is one of the American English monophthongs /i ɪ u ʊ ε æ ʌ ɔ ɑ/. The results of the acoustic analysis show that the NNS vowels are generally longer than the NS vowels. Furthermore, NNSs neutralise the vowel quality of two tense and lax pairs of vowels, /i ɪ/ and /u ʊ/, and rely more heavily on the phonetic duration when prononuncing them.

scholarly journals An Acoustic Investigation of Pakistani and American English Vowels

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Abdul Malik Abbasi ◽  
Mansoor Ahmed Channa ◽  
Stephen John ◽  
Masood Akhter Memon ◽  
Rabia Anwar
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Physical Properties ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
American English ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Acoustic Measurements ◽  
Computer Laboratory ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
English Vowels

Acoustic analysis tests the hypothesis that the physical properties of Pakistani English (PaKE) vowels differ in terms of acoustic measurements of Native American English speakers. The present paper aims to document the physical behavior of English vowels produced by PaKE learners. The major goal of this paper is to measure the production of sound frequencies coupled with vowel duration. The primary aim of this paper is to explore the different frequencies and duration of the vowels involved in articulation of PaKE. English vowels selected for this purpose are: /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /ɒ/ and /ə/. Total ten samplings were obtained from the department of computer science at Sindh Madressatul Islam University, Karachi. The study was based on the analysis of 500 (10×5×10=500) voice samples. Five vowel minimal pairs were selected and written in a carrier phrase [I say CVC now]. Ten speakers (5 male & five female) recorded their 500 voice samples using Praat speech processing tool and a high-quality microphone on laptop in a computer laboratory with no background sound. Three parameters were considered for the analysis of PaKE vowels i.e., duration of five vowels, fundamental frequency (F1 and F2). It was hypothesized that the properties of PaKE vowels are different from that of English native speakers. The hypothesis was accepted since the acoustic measurements of PaKE and English Native American speakers’ physical properties of sounds were discovered different.

scholarly journals Accuracy and acceptability of second-dialect performance on American television

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-252
Author(s):  
REMCO KNOOIHUIZEN
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
American English ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Mitigating Factors ◽  
Dialect Acquisition ◽  
Vowel Systems ◽  
Second Dialect Acquisition ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Australian English

This article analyses a case of second-dialect performance as an idealised instance of second-dialect acquisition, without mitigating factors such as access, analytical ability and motivation. It focuses on the Australian English and American English speech of three young Australian actors. An acoustic analysis of their short-vowel systems shows that they can successfully adapt to perform in an American English accent, but that their second-dialect system is less stable and more variable than their native system.A foreign-accent rating experiment on the actors’ American English with American English judges shows that the actors on average are thought to sound slightly less American than the native American English-speaker controls. The discrepancy between the acoustic accuracy and listener acceptability may be explained by judges attending to different features from those included in the acoustic study.This study of second-dialect performance shows what is maximally possible in second-dialect acquisition. Given the difference between the two measures of success, studies of second-dialect acquisition would benefit from including subjective measures in addition to acoustic accuracy.

VIII.—On the Conservatism of Language in a New Country

PMLA ◽  
1907 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Egbert Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
American English ◽  
Emigration And Immigration ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
British English ◽  
Main Mass ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Early English ◽  
Considerable Body ◽  
Xviith Century

I cannot begin this discussion more appropriately than by quoting a well known paragraph from Ellis's Early English Pronunciation. In Part I, page 19, he says:—“The results of emigration and immigration are curious and important. By emigration is here specially meant the separation of a considerable body of the inhabitants of a country from the main mass, without incorporating itself with another nation. Thus the English in America have not mixed with the natives, and the Norse in Iceland had no natives to mix with. In this case there is a kind of arrest of development, the language of the emigrants remains for a long time in the stage at which it was when emigration took place, and alters more slowly than the mother tongue, and in a different direction. Practically the speech of the American English is archaic with respect to that of the British English, and while the Icelandic scarcely differs from the old Norse, the latter has, since the colonization of Iceland, split up on the mainland into two distinct literary tongues, the Danish and Swedish. Nay, even the Irish English exhibits in many points the peculiarities of the pronunciation of the xviith century.”

scholarly journals FORENSIC SPEAKER PROFILING FROM THE SAMPLE IN ЕNGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE – VOWEL DURATION ANALYSIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (49) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Kristina Tomić ◽  
Katarina Milenković
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Novi Sad ◽  
The Voice

Forensic speaker profiling is a procedure employed in criminal cases where there is a voice recording of the criminal, but there is no suspect. It encompasses determining the age, gender, origin or socio- economic status of the recorded speaker (Rose 2002; Kašić, Đorđević 2009a; Jessen 2010). One of the challenges of modern forensic phonetic science is speaker profiling from the voice sample in a foreign language. In the current research, we analyzed the vowel duration of five speakers from Novi Sad and five speakers from Niš, when they were speaking spontaneously in their mother tongue, Serbian, and in a foreign lan- guage, English. We compared the quantity of vowels of each group of speakers within-language and across languages. The acoustic analysis of vowels was performed manually in Praat (Boersma, Weenink 2018), by looking at the spectrogram and waveform of the recordings. To test the difference in means of two groups of data, we used the Welch t-test (Welch 1947). Our results show that urban speakers from Niš and Novi Sad do not exhibit statistically significant differences in the duration of their English vowels. However, certain duration relations that exist between vowels may be indicative of one’s native dialect.

Minding your pleases and thank-yous in Britain and the US

English Today ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lynne Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American English ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Telephone Conversation ◽  
Negative Sentence ◽  
First Response ◽  
The Us ◽  
Emotional Commitment ◽  
Negative Statements ◽  
Positive Indicators

Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no. The research was inspired by a Dutch colleague's suggestion that no can be used as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement – that is, no can be used instead of ‘positive’ indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn't see her. Jefferson's first response to this suggestion was: but English no can't be an emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no). In the American data, that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response signals not just acknowledgement (‘I received your message and understood it’), but affiliation – communicating ‘I'd do the same thing’ or ‘I'm with you on that’. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves less often than they simply acknowledge what's been said. Here's a slightly simplified version of an example from Jefferson's British data.

Challenges of the parliamentary system in Iraq after 2003

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Emad Wakaa Ajil
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Parliamentary System ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Us ◽  
Long Time

Iraq is one of the most Arab countries where the system of government has undergone major political transformations and violent events since the emergence of the modern Iraqi state in 1921 and up to the present. It began with the monarchy and the transformation of the regime into the republican system in 1958. In the republican system, Continued until 2003, and after the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, the regime changed from presidential to parliamentary system, and the parliamentary experience is a modern experience for Iraq, as he lived for a long time without parliamentary experience, what existed before 2003, can not be a parliamentary experience , The experience righteousness The study of the parliamentary system in particular and the political process in general has not been easy, because it is a complex and complex process that concerns the political system and its internal and external environment, both of which are influential in the political system and thus on the political process as a whole, After the US occupation of Iraq, the United States intervened to establish a permanent constitution for the country. Despite all the circumstances accompanying the drafting of the constitution, it is the first constitution to be drafted by an elected Constituent Assembly. The Iraqi Constitution adopted the parliamentary system of government and approved the principle of flexible separation of powers in order to achieve cooperation and balance between the authorities.

The role of cross-linguistic stress pattern frequency and word similarity on the acquisition of English stress pattern by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Post Silveira
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
American English ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Stress Pattern ◽  
Target Language ◽  
English As Second Language ◽  
Word Similarity ◽  
L1 Transfer

This is a preliminary study in which we investigate the acquisition of English as second language (L2[1]) word stress by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1[2]). In this paper, we show results of a multiple choice forced choice perception test in which native speakers of American English and native speakers of Dutch judged the production of English words bearing pre-final stress that were both cognates and non-cognates with BP words. The tokens were produced by native speakers of American English and by Brazilians that speak English as a second language. The results have shown that American and Dutch listeners were consistent in their judgments on native and non-native stress productions and both speakers' groups produced variation in stress in relation to the canonical pattern. However, the variability found in American English points to the prosodic patterns of English and the variability found in Brazilian English points to the stress patterns of Portuguese. It occurs especially in words whose forms activate neighboring similar words in the L1. Transfer from the L1 appears both at segmental and prosodic levels in BP English. [1] L2 stands for second language, foreign language, target language. [2] L1 stands for first language, mother tongue, source language.

Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Native American Women ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Us ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Us Civil War

The rapid transformations brought on by the US Civil War and its aftermath touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. The disruption caused by war and the destruction of slavery opened up space, and at times created the necessity, for radically new roles for women that challenged antebellum gender norms and racial and class hierarchies. This essay examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women. In this period, many women faced new circumstances that inspired them to confront power in novel ways—by, for instance, fleeing slavery, petitioning governors, organizing bread riots, participating in political parades, or protesting segregation. The chapter also explores political violence in the postwar period that affected women differently across class, race, and region and that eventually helped to shut down the radical potential of the era.

Currency Manipulations and Bilateral Trade Between China and the USA

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masoud Moghaddam ◽  
Jie Duan
Keyword(s):  
Exchange Rate ◽  
Gravity Model ◽  
Bilateral Trade ◽  
Trade Deficit ◽  
The Us ◽  
Spot Exchange Rate ◽  
Main Culprit ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Strong Relation

The US trade deficit with China has existed for a long time, and its dollar value has been on the rise recently. It is widely believed that the main culprit is the manipulated value of Renminbi relative to the US dollar. Towards that end, this article re-examines the spot exchange rate and bilateral trade nexus using the Fourier approximation and a variant of the well-known gravity model during the sample period 1993: q1–2014: q1. Although China’s exports to the US Granger cause the exchange rate in a co-integrated space, the findings of a vector error correction model indicate that there is not a strong relation between the two. Indeed, within the aforementioned sample, only 15.52 per cent of changes in China’s exports to the USA are attributable to changes in the spot exchange rate. This is noticeably much smaller than impacts of the other variables utilized in the estimated gravity model. As such, the palpable trade imbalance between the USA and China cannot be single-handedly blamed on the spot exchange rate manipulations.

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