TITLE: Teaching of French pronunciation aimed at nasal vowels SUMMARY: The thesis deals with the issues of French pronunciation teaching at Czech schools. The theoretical part is aimed at teaching of pronunciation, the key concepts of phonetics and its importance in learning of foreign language. Then the thesis deals with the base of French phonetic system, especially the nasal vowels, the comparison of Czech and French phonetics and the main methods of teaching phonetics. The nasal vowels and their pronunciation are the starting point for the practical part - research in the field of the ability of Czech students to recognize and pronounce the nasal vowels in a good way. The research is based on 95 recordings of Czech students from different classes (from high school to bachelor's programme). KEYWORDS: French language, phonetics, phonology, teaching of phonetics, nasal vowels

This work deals with the variant of Spanish in Costa Rica and together with the phonological, morphosyntactical and lexical aspects examines languages in conctact and its influence on the lexical system. Apart from the data published in the Linguistic-enthnographic Atlas of Costa Rica the work presents also an investigation made by the author among the inhabitants of the central part of Costa Rica and compares it with other publications of the local lingüists who deal with the dialectal differences in the concrete area. At the same time its aim is to caracterize the Costa Rican variant in terms of the diversity related to the other types of Spanish and highlight the elements which appear exclusively in the speech of the inhabitants of Costa Rica. Key words: Costa Rican Spanish, phonetics, morfosyntax, vocabulary, languages in contact

The present Master's thesis deals with the forensic use of fundamental frequency characteristics, specifically with F0 mean values and indicators of variability. Phoneticians who specialise in the forensic analysis of speech generally believe that F0 does not hold much potential as a parameter useful for speaker identification, mainly because it is easily influenced by extrinsic factors (e.g. the speaker's emotional state, interfering noise, transmission channel or even the speaker's own effort to mask his voice), which cause high intra-individual variability. Despite these facts, however, the forensic use of F0 offers a number of advantages, namely straightforward extraction from the speech signal and lower susceptibility to varying lexical content - unlike, for example, vowel formants. This thesis investigates the recordings of 8 male speakers made in two different speech styles (spontaneous and read) and compares the respective indicators of F0 stability and variability, in particular those that are robust in varying external conditions: that is, the baseline for mean values and the 10.-90. percentile range for variability indicators. Apart from that, we take into account phenomena such as the creaky voice, which are idiosyncratic and contribute to easier speaker discrimination. Key words:...

This thesis deals with the changing role of phonetics in the history of teaching French as a foreign language. It provides a probe into the most significant methods of language teaching (the Grammar Translation Method, the Direct Method, the Audiolingual Method, the SGAV, Communicative Approach), including the current role of phonetics in teaching French. It also outlines a possible further development. The historical overview is then demonstrated on chosen French textbooks representing the individual methods, including a more detailed analysis of two contemporary textbooks. The analysis aims to provide information concerning the frequency of phonetic exercises, their focus, type and the use of phonetic transcription. Based on the theoretical background and the practical analysis, a list of inspiring approaches and techniques for current French teaching is made.

Voice comparison is one of the most frequently addressed terms in the context of forensic phonetics; however, so far experts have not been able to find a speech parameter which reliably discriminates between two speakers. Formant dynamics have brought promising results in this respect, therefore in our study using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) we tested the speaker-discriminatory potential of formant trajectories on real forensic recordings. The aim was firstly, to compare the results of LDA when formant frequencies or coefficients of quadratic and cubic fit are used as predictors and secondly, to compare the results when the analyzed classes are balanced or not regarding the number of objects. As for the predictors, all of the types demonstrated comparable classification rates, nevertheless, as LDA limits the number of predictors in relation to the class size, the quadratic fit appears to be the most efficient. Even though LDA was able to discriminate between different voices above chance, it cannot be recommended for forensic use. It delivered highly inconsistent results when the number of objects in the classes was changed; and more importantly, it significantly discriminates between objects of the same speaker. Key words: formant trajectories, voice comparison, LDA, Czech, forensic phonetics

Mgr. Veronika Štěpánová Czech orthoepic codification Abstract This doctoral thesis deals with the codification of standard Czech pronunciation. It focuses on how the phonetic level of the language is studied and described and, more generally, on orthoepic codification, its criteria, sources, relationship to orthography, etc. A historical overview of Czech orthoepic research, in particular of the first attempts at codification, work carried out for the orthoepic manuals Výslovnost spisovné češtiny I (ed. B. Hála; 1955, 1967) and Výslovnost spisovné češtiny II (ed. M. Romportl; 1978) is presented. In addition, research into standard Czech pronunciation from the 1980s to the present day is summarised from a new perspective. The primary focus of the thesis is a critical analysis of the principal Czech orthoepic manuals: not only Výslovnost spisovné češtiny I and II but also some older and newer works. Special attention is given to features (1) whose evaluation has changed over time (e.g. the pronunciation of mě and sh, the use of the glottal stop, simplification of certain consonant clusters, or voice assimilation before sonorants) and (2) which are problematic form the point of view of the contemporary pronunciation norm. This thesis is closely connected with the recently created Monolog corpus, which...

The topic of this master's thesis is the analyzis of a general conception of linguistics in ancient Egypt, with a narrow focus on the ancient Egyptians' knowledge of phonetics and phonology as well as language production and perception. These findings are compared with the information with which non-egyptological disciplines work. We analyse the ancient Egyptian material culture. This analysis also focuses on primary written records provided with the author's own translation and linguistic annotation using the Leipzig Glossing Rules. This study has a potential to help the fields outside of Egyptology better to understand the notions of ancient people's phonetic/phonological knowledge. It is clear from the sources discussed that the Egyptians considered the heart to be the seat of the speech center in today's conception, although there is evidence that they saw the connection between speech and the brain. Written sources also provide information on the categorization of hieroglyphic characters according to phonetic value, which points to the existence of segmental perception of the ancient Egyptians. However, there are no explicit mentions of vocal folds and voice formation, the essence of speech and language was seen by the Egyptians in the magical-religious sphere. Part of the thesis is a summary...

This thesis analyzes what acoustically sets apart recordings of healthy people from recordings of people afflicted with multiple sclerosis, and how this distinction can be used to automatically detect multiple sclerosis from fairly simple recordings of a subject's voice, potentially discovering early cases of this disease. Chapter 1 includes the theoretical background of the effect of multiple sclerosis on speech and the descriptions of the data, software, hypotheses and assumptions used here. Two sets recordings of read speech were used, a corpus of afflicted speakers and a control corpus of healthy speakers, totalling 250 individuals. A subset of this corpus was manually annotated, resulting in one dataset. Simultaneously, these entire corpora were also annotated automatically, resulting in another dataset, which was created to explore the possibility of detecting multiple sclerosis automatically. Chapter 2 describes the 13 acoustic parameters used in this thesis, their exact hypothesized relationships with the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and the ways they were calculated. Chapter 3 elaborates on the statistical testing of the aforementioned parameters, their interpretation, the success rate of the two machine learning models used to assess their total predictive power, and a potential way to apply the...

Despite a continuous development in computer sciences and related disciplines, speaker identification remains one of the most challenging tasks in forensic phonetics. The reason for this is the fact that our knowledge of how identity is reflected in the acoustic signal is still limited. The present study aims to contribute to the search of speaker-specific cues by examining spectral properties of the source signal. Specifically, it examines to what extent three short-term measures of spectral tilt, namely H1-H2, H1-A1 and H1-A3, can discriminate 16 Czech female speakers. It also addresses the influence of vowel quality, syllable status with respect to stress and position of stress group in the utterance on the values of these measures. The results show that these parameters do have some discriminative power, though the contribution of individual parameters differs. The study indicates that discrimination of speakers is the most successful in stressed syllables and argues that individual vowels could differ in their usefulness for speaker identification. The results of LDA based on these short- term measures of spectral tilt were complemented with long-term measures, namely alpha index, Kitzing index and Hammarberg index which quantify the slope of the LTAS. The present study suggests that...

This thesis aims to thoroughly describe the temporal characteristics of spoken Czech by means of phone durations and their changes under the influence of several prosodic and segmental factors, such as position in a higher unit (syllable, word or prosodic phrase), length of the higher unit, segmental environment, structure of the syllable or phrase-final lengthening. The speech material comes from a semi-spontaneous corpus of scripted dialogues comprising 4046 utterances by 34 speakers. The descriptions are afterwards used for the creation of a rule-based temporal model, which provides a baseline for analysing local articulation rate contours and their speaker-specificity. The results indicate, that systematic speaker-specific differences can be found in the segmental domain, as well as in the temporal contours. Moreover, speaker identification potential of articulation rate and global temporal features is also assessed. Keywords: temporal characteristics, temporal modelling, phone duration, speaker identification, Czech