Teaching prosody awareness in spontaneous speech for non-linguistic students

The paper reports on the findings of the study of prosody in teaching spontaneous speech production. Insufficient development of a scientifically based methodology for building oral language skills, taking into account its prosodic characteristics, determines the relevance of the study. The main goal of the research is to correct the methodology of teaching spontaneous learner talk, based on the results of experimental phonetic research. The research methodology is based on an integrated approach using linguistic methods of experimental phonetic research, as well as methods of psychological and pedagogic research. The results of phonetic experiment of 97 monolingual utterances of undergraduate students, non-English majors (total running 190 minutes) show a summary of commonly occurring problems that lead to non-native intonation. These problems are mostly related to improper segmentation, wrong distribution of the utterance stress, incorrect rhythmic organisation of speech, break of intonation continuum, inappropriate intonation patterns and melodic contour. The proposed prosodic focus on teaching spontaneous monologue speech includes the following stages: sensitisation, imitation, reading with prosody and practice activities. Methodological recommendations contain specific proposals for teaching sentence stress, syntagmatic division, pausing, intonation and rhythmics of spontaneous speech.

Persuasion prosody in prosecutor’s speech: Ukrainian and english

This paper presents the research of prosodic means conveying the persuasion modality in a prosecutor’s speech in court. The material under study consists of English and Ukrainian speeches of the prosecutors (the total duration time is 16 hours). The results of the experimental material examination demonstrate common and specific characteristics of prosody components (melody, loudness, tempo, timber and sentence stress) in English and Ukrainian. Pragmatics of prosody semantics and correlation between its parameters have been proved. It has been stated that in both English and Ukrainian an utterance becomes emphatic due to the prosodic means of persuasion in a prosecutor’s speech as follows: 1) changes of tempo; 2) changes of the pitch of a voice; 3) replacements of the rising tone with the falling one and vice versa; 4) usage of complex tones; 5) use of an interrupted ascending or descending scale; 6) change of sentence stress type; 7) division of a sense group into two or more parts. The above mentioned facts enable us to conclude that: while describing the first of these aspects of typological similarity of prosody in the compared languages, the parameters of the pitch component of intonation are most informative when differentiating attitudinal ones. The specificity of interaction between prosodic and grammar means when expressing persuasion in Ukrainian and English prosecutor’s speech is caused by a degree of distinction between the grammatical and vocabulary systems of the compared languages.

An Acoustic Analysis of New Zealand English Vowels in Auckland

<p>This study presents an acoustic analysis looking at phonetic diversity in Auckland. New Zealand English is often characterized by a lack of regional variation; however, this claim has been made without considering Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Over the last 30 years there has been increased migration to New Zealand, specifically to Auckland. In 35% of Auckland’s suburbs, no ethnic group represents more than 50% of the population. In addition, many speakers were born overseas, and many more have grown up using different varieties of English as the spoken norm. In this study, 40 New Zealand English speakers from three suburbs in Auckland (Mt. Roskill n= 14, Papatoetoe, n=13, Titirangi, n=13) were recorded. For our young group (n=33) the participants were aged between 18 and 25 years, and each suburb was evenly split between male and female participants. Speakers were either New Zealand born or arrived in the country under the age of seven. Our older group (n=7) were female speakers, all New Zealand born, and aged between 40 and 70 yrs. Vowels which had sentence stress were identified and extracted, and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. All formant tracks were hand checked. Over 8000 monophthong tokens and 4000 diphthongs were analysed in this study. Whilst no differences were found between young speakers from different suburbs, there were age effects. Further, speech from the young Auckland speakers was noticeably different to findings from other studies on New Zealand English. Most notably monophthongs TRAP and DRESS were lower than expected. In addition the first targets of the diphthongs FACE and GOAT have risen, and PRICE has fronted, for younger speakers from all suburbs. The thesis concludes discussing the implications of the results.</p>

An Acoustic Analysis of New Zealand English Vowels in Auckland

<p>This study presents an acoustic analysis looking at phonetic diversity in Auckland. New Zealand English is often characterized by a lack of regional variation; however, this claim has been made without considering Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Over the last 30 years there has been increased migration to New Zealand, specifically to Auckland. In 35% of Auckland’s suburbs, no ethnic group represents more than 50% of the population. In addition, many speakers were born overseas, and many more have grown up using different varieties of English as the spoken norm. In this study, 40 New Zealand English speakers from three suburbs in Auckland (Mt. Roskill n= 14, Papatoetoe, n=13, Titirangi, n=13) were recorded. For our young group (n=33) the participants were aged between 18 and 25 years, and each suburb was evenly split between male and female participants. Speakers were either New Zealand born or arrived in the country under the age of seven. Our older group (n=7) were female speakers, all New Zealand born, and aged between 40 and 70 yrs. Vowels which had sentence stress were identified and extracted, and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. All formant tracks were hand checked. Over 8000 monophthong tokens and 4000 diphthongs were analysed in this study. Whilst no differences were found between young speakers from different suburbs, there were age effects. Further, speech from the young Auckland speakers was noticeably different to findings from other studies on New Zealand English. Most notably monophthongs TRAP and DRESS were lower than expected. In addition the first targets of the diphthongs FACE and GOAT have risen, and PRICE has fronted, for younger speakers from all suburbs. The thesis concludes discussing the implications of the results.</p>

Self- and Peer-Assessment of Student-Generated Podcasts to Improve Comprehensibility in Undergraduate EFL Students

This study reports on a mixed-methods research project into self- and peer-formative assessment of student-generated podcasts in a group of 18 undergraduate students. The aim was to determine whether there were any gains in the spoken comprehensibility of the participants while having them reflect on and adjust their use of suprasegmentals (thought groups, sentence stress, and intonation). Data were gathered from student logs, student-generated podcasts, and a questionnaire. Results unveiled the exhibition of self-regulated behaviours and gains in comprehensibility. This study highlights the importance of helping learners look critically and reflectively at their own oral production and of incorporating training on suprasegmentals within English as a foreign language courses to help learners communicate more effectively within a globalised context.

New Zealand English in Auckland

This study acoustically analyses the vowel space of adult New Zealand English speakers from a predominantly Pasifika suburb in Auckland (Papatoetoe). These speakers (n = 13) are compared to two equivalent groups from non-Pasifika Auckland suburbs, Mount Roskill (n = 14) and Titirangi (n = 6). All participants are New Zealand English speakers aged 16–25. There were equal numbers of male and female participants. For the acoustic analysis vowels with sentence stress were identified and extracted and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. This study looks at over 8000 monophthongs and 4000 diphthongs. The study found minimal differences between speakers from different suburbs, but all groups had notable differences from the traditional New Zealand English (NZE) vowel space. These differences align with previous comments regarding the vowels of Pasifika New Zealand English. The paper concludes by contemplating what these results say about Pasifika New Zealand English and New Zealand English in Auckland.

Exploring the Complexity of the L2 Intonation System: An Acoustic and Eye-Tracking Study

Phonological research has demonstrated that English intonation, variably referred to as prosody, is a multidimensional and multilayered system situated at the interface of information structure, morphosyntactic structure, phonological phenomena, and pragmatic functions. The structural and functional complexity of the intonational system, however, is largely under-addressed in L2 pronunciation teaching, leading to a lack of spontaneous use of intonation despite successful imitation in classrooms. Focusing on contrastive and implicational sentence stress, this study explored the complexity of the English intonation system by investigating how L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers use multiple acoustic features (i.e., pitch range, pitch level, duration, and intensity) in signaling contrastive and implicational information and how one acoustic feature (maximum pitch level) is affected by information structure (contrast), morphosyntactic structure (phrasal boundary), and a phonological phenomenon (declination) in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' speech. Using eye-tracking technology, we also investigated (1) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' real-time processing of lexical items that carry information structure (i.e., contrast) and typically receive stress in L1 speakers' speech; (2) the influence of visual enhancement (italics and bold) on L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive information; and (3) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of pictures with contrastive information. Statistical analysis using linear mixed-effects models showed that L1 English speakers and Mandarin-English L2 speakers differed in their use of acoustic cues in signaling contrastive and implicational information. They also differed in the use of maximum pitch level in signaling sentence stress influenced by contrast, phrasal boundary, and declination. We did not find differences in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive and implicational information at the sentence level, but the two groups of participants differ in their processing of contrastive information in passages and pictures. These results suggest that processing limitations may be the reason why L2 speakers did not use English intonation spontaneously. The findings of this study also suggest that Complexity Theory (CT), which emphasizes the complex and dynamic nature of intonation, is a theoretical framework that has the potential of bridging the gap between L2 phonology and L2 pronunciation teaching.

An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis of the Acquisition of English Sentence Stress Based on Acoustic Data

The present study adopts both empirical and theoretical methods for the analysis of the acquisition of English sentence stress based on Optimality Theory, aiming to overcome mispronunciation of English sentence stress. Optimality Theory has a dramatic impact on most areas in linguistics besides phonology. The acoustic software Praat is chosen to collect and label data as the basis of the empirical method. Then, through analyzing the four major principles of distribution of sentence stress (content words stressed principle, rightmost words stressed principle, leftmost words stressed principle, and new information priority principle) and based on the analysis of Optimality Theory, the software Praat, and SPSS, the researcher can present the following findings: firstly, the constraint hierarchical ranking of nonnative speakers is DEP-IO >> NEW-IP >> ALIGN-IP-LEFT >> ALIGN-IP-RIGHT. Secondly, the native speakers also undergo the demotion of constraint hierarchical ranking: NEW-IP >> DEP-IO >> ALIGN-IP-RIGHT >> ALIGN-IP-LEFT. Thirdly, the constraint in each demotion of constraint hierarchical ranking during different stages is as follows: NEW-IP constraint moves from the undominated position to the dominated position in the hierarchy; ALIGN-IP-RIGHT and ALIGN-IP-LEFT constraints move from the dominated position to the lower position in the hierarchy. Through the specific analysis, the researcher draws a conclusion that the varied reasons affect the nonnative speakers to master the distribution of sentence stress due to their incorrect position in the demotion of constraint hierarchical ranking.

On motivation and incoordination in grammar – The case of two Polish exclamative constructions

The paper discusses two Polish exclamative constructions as instances of the Abstract Exclamative Construction (AEC) proposed by Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996). It is argued that while the Co-za Exclamative Construction is motivated straightforwardly by the identifying Co-za Question Construction as well as AEC, the Ale Exclamative Construction involves not only AEC but also a more complex process called “incoordination”, whereby a second coordinate clause with its coordinating conjunction ale becomes an autonomous monoclausal construction. The process involves a change in the information structure and in illocutionary force, which becomes increasingly expressive. In addition, it is accompanied by a shift of the sentence stress from the focal element in the second coordinate clause to the initial Ale.