This thesis deals with phonetic transcription in lower-secondary school English classes. The theoretical part concerns the relationship between pronunciation and transcription. It also outlines the present situation from the point of view both, the teacher and learner, and examines transcriptional systems in lower-secondary textbooks. The practical part is aimed to the analysis of learner?s skills to take down familiar and unknown words with phonetic transcription and read it afterwards. The presented recommendations and the methodical manual with types of exercises, which would help to improve the learner?s pronunciation quality by using phonetic transcription, are based on the found connections.

This thesis discusses theoretical analysis of the origin of speech, introduces applications of speech technologies and explains the contemporary approach to phonetical transcription of speech recordings. Furthermore, it describes the metrics of audio recordings quality assessment, which is split into two discrete classes. The first one groups signal quality metrics, while the other one groups content richness metrics. The first goal of the practical section is to create a statistical model for accuracy prediction of machine transcription of speech recordings based on a measurement of their quality. The second goal is to evaluate which partial metrics are the most essential for accuracy prediction of machine transcription.

This thesis deals with detection of speech disorders. One of the aims of this thesis is choosing suitable parameterization: short-time energy, zero-crossing rate, linear predictive analysis, perceptual linear predictive analysis, RASTA method, cepstral analysis and mel-frequency cepstral coefficient can be chosed for detections. Next aim is construction of detector of speech disorders based on DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) and artificial neuron network. Single detection proceeds on the base of collected tokens from chosen analysis and phonetic transcription of speech. Analyses, detector and phonetic transcription of Czech language are implemented in simulation environment of MATLAB.

This dissertation focuses on the contributions of Phonetics in the teaching and learning processes of languages pronunciation in Singing. For that, it investigates a teaching proposal based on this discipline of Linguistics, the Phonetics, with emphasis on articulation and representation of speech sounds - the Articulatory Phonetics and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in practice, the phonetic transcription. It is based on the literature on Phonetics and Phonology, in the Linguistics area, on the Teaching of Languages, in the Applied Linguistics, and on the Diction for Singers, in the Arts - specifically, the field of Music, singing. Based on the diagnosis made on the subject of Diction in technical and undergraduate courses of Singing in institutions in the triangle region of Minas Gerais, it reflects and suggests changes on didactic and pedagogical aspects, related to the training of singers and singing teachers. It intends to contribute with theoretical reflections, teaching materials and methodological approaches for the teaching of pronunciation of the major languages in the classical repertoire performed in Brazil. / Esta dissertação centra-se nas contribuições da Fonética no processo ensino e aprendizagem da pronúncia de línguas no Canto. Para isto, investiga uma proposta de ensino elaborada com base nesta disciplina da Linguística, a Fonética, com ênfase na articulação e representação dos sons da fala a Fonética Articulatória e o Alfabeto Fonético Internacional (AFI) em sua prática, a transcrição fonética. Fundamenta-se em literaturas sobre Fonética e Fonologia, da área de Linguística, sobre o Ensino de Línguas, da Linguística Aplicada e, sobre Dicção para Cantores, das Artes especificamente, da subárea Música, o instrumento Canto. Com base no diagnóstico da disciplina Dicção em cursos técnicos e graduação em Canto de algumas instituições na região do Triângulo Mineiro, reflete e sugere mudanças de aspectos didáticos e pedagógicos, em função da formação de cantores professores de Canto. Pretende contribuir com reflexões teóricas, material didático e abordagens para o ensino da pronúncia das principais línguas do repertório erudito praticado no Brasil. / Mestre em Artes