In this thesis, I set out to investigate whether the use of songs can help L2 speakers learn to better perceive and produce suprasegmental phenomena. Effective pronunciation skills are necessary for successful communication and as such can greatly impact one’s personal, social, and professional life. Studying the use of songs for teaching pronunciation is interesting because as a linguistically rich material, songs can enhance learning due to their positive affective, social, and cognitive influence in the L2 classroom. Using songs to teach pronunciation within a Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) framework constitutes a novel approach to an underexplored area of classroom research. In order to learn how using songs might help native Spanish speakers learn English suprasegmentals, I conducted a mixed methods exploratory short-term case study of Chilean university students studying English Language and Literature at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Using three groups: a control, songs, and no-songs group, the pre- to post-course progress was measured first with the two treatment groups combined and then with them separated. In this way we were able to measure the effectiveness of songs compared to other materials as well as to no intervention whatsoever. After two weeks of instruction, we found that using songs can significantly help in the production of the schwa when reading a text and of thought groups when speaking freely. Results obtained in listening tests were not statistically significant. However, closer examination of the performance of individual songs- group participants showed not only a greater than average progress in different suprasegmental areas in both listening and speaking, but also an appreciation of songs as an effective and enjoyable means of learning pronunciation. It would be advantageous for future research to explore the effects of teaching the pronunciation areas using the same methodology but for longer periods of time with delayed post-course testing to determine whether the effects are long-term. In addition, further exploration into the relationship between pronunciation perception and production could provide insight for the development of more effective teaching techniques.

Stress and intonation play important roles in the production and perception of the English language. They are always very difficult for second language learners to acquire. Yet, a review of literature reveals that these important suprasegmental features have not received due attention from second language researchers or teachers. In Vietnam in particular, there is no research to date which studies the stress and intonation errors in the performance of Vietnamese learners of English. This study uses the procedures of Error Analysis to investigate the problem. Chapter one and two give a review of relevant literature and a description of the methodology of the study. In chapter three, the students' stress and intonation errors are described and classified, and the possible sources of those errors are discussed. Finally, chapter four shows implications and makes suggestions for the improvement of teaching and learning English stress and intonation.

One of the major questions in second language (L2) phonological learning is whether perception precedes (and therefore guides) production. This question is important for knowing what types of training most benefit L2 learners. While most theories assume that perception always precedes production (e.g., Best, 1995; Flege, 1995), several recent studies have found that production may precede perception (e.g., Baker & Trofimovich, 2006; Beach, Brunham, & Kitamura, 2001; Goto, 1971; Sheldon & Strange, 1982; Underbakke, 1993), demonstrating that this complex relationship may differ depending on how and when the L2 is learned. The current study seeks to further explore this relationship by examining how perception and production influence each other on the suprasegmental (i.e., primary word stress) level. While many studies have examined whether perceptual training can influence production accuracy of suprasegmentals, little to no research has examined whether the opposite is true. Thus the goal of this study was to examine whether ESL learners who were trained in suprasegmental pronunciation accuracy improved in listening and speaking more than similar students who were trained in perception accuracy. Comparisons of pre- and post-tests suggest that focusing on accurate production improves not only production accuracy, but also listening comprehension more than does training in listening comprehension. These results enlighten our understanding of how perception and production influence each other, and may underscore the importance of providing bottom-up pronunciation skills for improving L2 phonological learning.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether 20 listeners could identify the gender of 10 preadolescent children from speech samples. An additional aim was to evaluate whether listeners identified children more accurately when listening to speech samples when more linguistic context was available. The listeners were presented with a total of 190 speech samples in four different categories of linguistic context: segments, words, sentences, and discourse. The listeners were instructed to listen to each speech sample and decide whether the speaker was a male or female. In addition, the listeners were instructed to rate their level of confidence in their decision on a 1-10 scale. Results showed listeners identified the gender of the speakers with a high degree of accuracy, ranging from 86% to 95%. In addition, statistical analysis showed significant differences in the accuracy of listener judgments among the four levels of linguistic context, with segments having the lowest (83%) and discourse the highest accuracy (99%). At the segmental level, the listeners' ability to identify the each speaker's gender from a speech sample was greater for vowels than for fricatives, with both types of phoneme being identified at a rate well above chance. Significant differences in identification were found between the /s/ and /ʃ/ fricatives, but not between the four corner vowels. The perception of gender is likely multifactorial, with listeners possibly using phonetic, prosodic, or stylistic speech cues to determine a speaker's gender.

The purpose of this study was to examine the prosodic cues used by 7 to 11 year-old children to signal questions and declarative statements in terms of changes in fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and intensity. Additional aims were to evaluate how children's use of prosody changes as a function of gender and method of elicitation. A group of 16 children participated in three different types of elicitation tasks (imitative, reading, and naturalistic). An acoustic analysis revealed that the participants produced the different sentence types using a variety of acoustic cues. Not only do children vary the mean of F0 and intensity at the end of the sentences, but they also seemed to use relative differences in peak intensity and F0. Differences between sentence types were also found in the F0 and intensity slope in the terminal portion of sentences. In addition, the way in which the participants signaled sentence type changed as a function of speaker gender and elicitation method for a limited number of acoustic measures. Although the present study found acoustic differences in how the participants' produced the sentence types, additional research is needed to determine the perceptual impact of such differences.

No description available.

My doctoral research addressed two questions regarding the influence of orthographic knowledge on speech processing. First, I attempted to identify the locus of the orthographic effects observed in spoken word recognition tasks in which the orthographic consistency and the congruency between the phonological and orthographic representations of the stimuli were manipulated. Several studies provided converging results suggesting that only phonological representations activated at lexical or postlexical processing levels are affected by orthographic knowledge, while those activated at prelexical levels are not. However, the lexical processing level is not the only factor that determines the occurrence and/or the size of the orthographic effects. Regardless of the processing level tapped by the task, the characteristics of the material and the way in which participants perform the tasks also play an important role. Second, I examined the generality of the orthographic effects both in the suprasegmental domain and in the operation of working memory. Overall, the results showed orthographic effects in both situations./La question de l’influence des connaissances orthographiques sur le traitement de la parole a été abordée sous différents angles à travers les études menées dans le cadre de ma thèse de doctorat. Plus précisément, le locus des effets orthographiques a été examiné dans des tâches de reconnaissance de la parole grâce à une manipulation de la consistance orthographique et de la congruence entre les représentations phonologique et orthographique des stimuli. Les résultats obtenus convergent pour indiquer que seules les représentations phonologiques activées dans les situations qui exigent un traitement lexical et/ou post-lexical sont affectées par les représentations orthographiques. Cependant, l’occurrence et/ou la magnitude des effets orthographiques obtenus semblent dépendre également des caractéristiques du matériel et de la manière dont les participants effectuent la tâche. La question de la généralité des effets orthographiques a aussi été abordée : les effets orthographiques ont été démontrés d’une part dans le domaine suprasegmental (sur le ton lexical) et, d’autre part, dans le fonctionnement de la mémoire de travail.

Perceptual learning, when applied to speech, describes experience-evoked adjustments to the cognitive-perceptual processes required for recognising spoken language. It provides the theoretical basis for improved understanding of a speech signal that is initially difficult to perceive. Reduced intelligibility is a frequent and debilitating symptom of dysarthria, a speech disorder associated with neurological disease or injury. The current thesis investigated perceptual learning of dysarthric speech, by jointly considering intelligibility improvements and associated learning mechanisms for listeners familiarised with the neurologically degraded signal. Moderate hypokinetic dysarthria was employed as the test case in the three phases of this programme of research. The initial research phase established strong empirical evidence of improved recognition of dysarthric speech following a familiarisation experience. Sixty normal hearing listeners were randomly assigned to one of three groups and familiarised with passage readings under the following conditions: (1) neurologically intact speech (control) (n = 20), dysarthric speech (passive familiarisation) (n = 20), and (3) dysarthric speech coupled with written information (explicit familiarisation) (n = 20). Subsequent phrase transcription analysis revealed that the intelligibility scores of both groups familiarised with dysarthric speech were significantly higher than those of the control group. Furthermore, performance gains were superior, in both size and longevity, when the familiarisation conditions were explicit. A condition discrepancy in segmentation strategies, in which attention towards syllabic stress contrast cues increased following explicit familiarisation but decreased following passive familiarisation, indicated that performance differences were more than simply magnitude of benefit. Thus, it was speculated that the learning that occurred with passive familiarisation may be qualitatively different to that which occurred with explicit familiarisation. The second phase of the research programme followed up on the initial findings and examined whether the key variable behind the use of particular segmentation strategies was simply the presence or absence of written information during familiarisation. Forty normal hearing listeners were randomly assigned to one of two groups and were familiarised with experimental phrases under either passive (n = 20) or explicit (n = 20) learning conditions. Subsequent phrase transcription analysis revealed that regardless of condition, all listeners utilised syllabic stress contrast cues to segment speech following familiarisation with phrases that emphasised this prosodic perception cue. Furthermore, the study revealed that, in addition to familiarisation condition, intelligibility gains were dependent on the type of the familiarisation stimuli employed. Taken together, the first two research phases demonstrated that perceptual learning of dysarthric speech is influenced by the information afforded within the familiarisation procedure. The final research phase examined the role of indexical information in perceptual learning of dysarthric speech. Forty normal hearing listeners were randomly assigned to one of two groups and were familiarised with dysarthric speech via a training task that emphasised either the linguistic (word identification) (n = 20) or indexical (speaker identification) (n = 20) properties of the signal. Intelligibility gains for listeners trained to identify indexical information paralleled those achieved by listeners trained to identify linguistic information. Similarly, underlying error patterns were also comparable between the two training groups. Thus, phase three revealed that both indexical and linguistic features of the dysarthric signal are learnable, and can be used to promote subsequent processing of dysarthric speech. In summary, this thesis has demonstrated that listeners can learn to better understand neurologically degraded speech. Furthermore, it has offered insight into how the information afforded by the specific familiarisation procedure is differentially leveraged to improve perceptual performance during subsequent encounters with the dysarthric signal. Thus, this programme of research affords preliminary evidence towards the development of a theoretical framework that exploits perceptual learning for the treatment of dysarthria.

The research is a study of male working class pronunciation in the Rhondda, part of the 'Valleys' area of South East Wales. It encompasses both segmental and suprasegmental (prosodic) phonology. The segmental analysis is primarily auditory although it has some supporting acoustic detail. It examines the consonant and vowel systems of Rhondda Valleys English (RVE), with phonetic realizations and lexical incidence. Comparisons with British R.P. are made and similarities with neighbouring varieties of English (e.g. the West Country) and the Welsh Language are observed. The suprasegmental (prosodic) analysis is of spontaneous conversational data, and is auditory and instrumental. The phonology of RVE intonation is described mainly via a system of intonation phrases (IPs), accents, and terminal tones. IP tunes (overall contours) are observed to contain accent profiles whose pitch obtrusions to the stressed syllable are, in the majority of cases, downwards and whose initial pitch movement from the stressed syllable is rising in over 80% of final accents and final accents. A large majority of IP terminal tones in the data are ultimately rising. Aspects of length and rhythm are examined. Evidence is found of rhythmic organization, e.g. of alternation between strong and weak beats. Strongly accented syllables can be accompanied either by lengthening of the vowel, or by shortening of the vowel with lengthening of the succeeding consonant. Which of these two strategies is adopted by the speaker depends partly on the vowel and partly on how the speaker syllabifies the word. The final 'weak' syllable of an IP may be phonetically stronger (with greater duration, envelope amplitude and pitch prominence) than the accented penult. Several of the prosodic features of RVE are found to bear strong influence from the Welsh Language.

Orientador: Gladis Massini-Cagliari / Banca: Luciani Ester Tenani / Banca: Flaviani Romani Fernandes Svartman / Banca: Rosane de Andrade Berlinck / Banca: Renata Maria Facuri Coelho Marchezan / Resumo: O objetivo desta tese consiste em estudar a maneira como regueiros maranhenses da zona rural da cidade de São Luís, falantes monolíngües de português brasileiro, variedade rural ludovicense, adaptam fonética e fonologicamente o inglês dos reggaes que cantam nessa língua, com vistas a obter seqüências que façam sentido na sua língua materna. Analisando os padrões fonológicos do Português Brasileiro Rural Ludovicense (PBRL), variedade linguística nativa dos sujeitos da pesquisa, e a interferência de uma língua "estrangeira" que é nativizada no som, com finalidades de obtenção de um sentido também "nativo", buscou-se também discutir a identidade fonológica do Português. A hipótese inicial consiste em verificar a tendência para a manutenção de vogais tônicas e de traços de consoantes em posições tônicas, substituição / adaptação / supressão / reinterpretação de vogais e consoantes em posições átonas, prevalecendo a percepção de falantes de português, não fluentes em inglês, daquilo que ouvem nas músicas, e a busca de sentido em uma seqüência sonora aparentemente sem sentido. No entanto, no decorrer da pesquisa, são identificados processos utilizados pelos falantes do PBRL para a adaptação fonológica da língua original (Inglês) em direção à língua alvo, sendo tais processos a manutenção da qualidade da vogal tônica, a monotongação, a ditongação, a semelhança entre consoantes, a simplificação e a complexificação do padrão silábico e a manutenção da posição do acento. Dentre estes processos, há uma incidência maior na semelhança entre consoantes, da manutenção da posição do acento e da manutenção da qualidade da vogal tônica / Abstract: The purpose of this work consists in studying how the reggae musicians from Maranhão state, living in the rural area of Sao Luis, as monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, rural variety from São Luis, adapt phonetically and phonologically the English language of the reggae music that they sing, in order to achieve sequences that can actually make sense in their mother language. Analyzing the phonological patterns of Brazilian Rural Portuguese from São Luis do Maranhão (Português Brasileiro Rural Ludovicense - PBRL), the native linguistic variety of the research subjects, and the interference of a "foreign" language that is turned into native language in speech in order to reach some native meaning, we also sought to discuss the Portuguese phonological identity. The initial assumption consists in verifying the trend to maintain stressed vowels and consonant traces in stressed positions, replacement / adaptation / suppression / reinterpretation of vowels and consonants in non-stressed positions, in which prevail the Portuguese speakers‟ perception, non-fluent in English, of what they hear in the songs and the search for some meaning in a sound sequence that is apparently meaningless. However, throughout this work, we identified some processes taken by these PBRL speakers for the phonological adaptation of the original language (English) towards the target language, such as the maintenance of the stressed vowel quality, the monophthongization, the diphthongization, consonant similarity, simplification and complexification of the syllabical pattern and the maintenance of the stress position. Among these processes, there is a greater incidence of the consonant similarity, the maintenance of stress position and the maintenance of the stressed vowel quality / Doutor