This diploma thesis examines the foreign accent of Czech speakers in English. We focus on the factor of phone duration, which relates to both segmental and prosodic levels of phonetic description and is one of the correlates of prosodic prominence and speech rhythm. 84 words were selected from the texts avaible in the Prague Phonetic Corpus that have analogues in the loanword lexicon of Czech. Pronunciations of these words by native speakers (professional radio reporters) were compared with productions by Czech university students. The students were recorded prior to atteding a course in English phonetics. Based on our observations of durational patterns, we infer some plausible tendencies to be expected in Czech production of English. As durational interference from Czech into English has up to this date been a relatively unresearch domain, the present study adopts a qualitative research methodology. Keywords: Duration, Foreign Accent, Czech English, Interference 6

TITLE: Distinctive Features of Irish Accent AUTOR: Tomáš Uher DEPARTMENT: Department of English Language and Literature SUPERVISOR: Mgr. Kristýna Poesová ABSTRACT: The aim of this thesis is to examine the distinctive phonetic and phonological aspects of Irish English. The theoretical part provides a comprehensive description of the segmental and suprasegmental features of the Irish accent in contrast with the Received Pronunciation. The first section of the practical part analyses the speech of three Irish actors in Irish films and TV shows in order to examine the use of the distinctive features described in the theoretical part. The second section of the practical part presents a 45 minute long lesson plan on the Irish accent with suggested exercises for intermediate (B2) learners. KEY WORDS: accent, Irish, pronunciation, phonetics, phonology, lesson plan

The present study aims to address the question of how vowel quality varies between rural and town-dwelling male speakers of Irish-English in South Roscommon, Ireland. Previous studies have identified four distinct varieties of Irish-English in Ireland: the Eastern, South &Western, Midland, and Northern varieties, loosely based on the political provinces of Munster, Connaught, Leinster, and Ulster. County Roscommon straddles the provinces of Connaught and Leinster, complicating the presence of phonological features associated with one of two different ‘accent regions’. The last phonological study carried out in Roscommon was by Patrick Leo Henry in 1957. While this was a promising start in assessing regional distinctions, rural ones in particular, the lack of recent studies leaves a sizeable gap that does not address modern changes in the linguistic landscape of Ireland, nor the availability of modern methods of acoustic analysis. In particular, the present study investigates the pre-nasal merging of front unrounded vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, vowel centralization, and a lower /æ/, associated with the Western variety of Irish English. Factors such as supraregionalization lead to my hypothesis that rural speakers will demonstrate higher frequency of the vowel features associated with the Western variety. To assess the frequency of certain vowel sounds, twenty participants were recorded and formant data was extracted for F1 and F2 values of the tokens. It was found that the rural speakers in Roscommon demonstrated a more prominent merger between /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, a lower [æ], and the rural speakers demonstrated an overall trend toward centralization.

Os profissionais da comunicação frequentemente buscam atendimento fonoaudiológico para a suavização de características desprestigiadas em sua fala. Estudos têm apontado a Telessaúde como ferramenta complementar ou alternativa no cuidado das pessoas. Entretanto, é necessário investigar o impacto do uso destas tecnologias na prática clínica e avaliar se as orientações dadas a distância são tão efetivas quanto as orientações presenciais. O objetivo deste estudo é verificar a eficácia de uma oficina na modalidade a distância para suavização de sotaque do arquifonema {R} quando realizado como tepe retroflexo e comparar a abordagem a distância com a presencial. Foram desenvolvidas duas oficinas: Oficina para Suavização de Sotaque a Distância, disponibilizada na Plataforma Virtual Tidia-Ae da Universidade de São Paulo e a Oficina para Suavização de Sotaque Presencial, realizada no Anfiteatro de Fonoaudiologia da Faculdade de Odontologia de Bauru da Universidade de São Paulo. Ambas as oficinas foram compostas por dez módulos contendo atividades teóricas e atividades práticas. Participaram das oficinas 23 estudantes/profissionais de Locução/Jornalismo/Rádio e TV, de ambos os sexos e média de idade de 26,87 anos (DP = 7,37). Para avaliação das oficinas, todos os participantes tiveram suas vozes gravadas e responderam a questionários antes e ao final das oficinas. Os resultados do presente estudo indicaram que os participantes de ambas as oficinas obtiveram suavização de sotaque significante após sua participação nas oficinas e que não houve diferença significante entre as duas abordagens de oficina. / The Communication Professionals often seek speech therapy for smoothing discredited characteristics in speech. Studies have pointed Telehealth as a complementary or alternative tool to care people. However, it is necessary investigate the impact of using these technologies in clinical practice and assess whether the guidelines given in telepractice are as effective as face-toface guidance. This study aims verify the effectiveness of a e-learning workshop for smoothing accent at archiphoneme {R} when pronounced as retroflex flap and compare telepractice and face-to-face approach. Two workshops were developed: the \"E-learning Workshop to Smooth Accent\" available for participants in Tidia-Ae Virtual Platform of the University of São Paulo, and the \"Face-to-Face Workshop to Smooth Accent\" held at the Speech Pathologys Amphitheatre at Faculty of Dentistry of Bauru, University of São Paulo. Participated 23 students or professional media workers, regardless of gender and with 26,87 average age (SD = 7,37). Both workshops were composed of ten modules containing theoretical and practical activities. For workshops evaluation, all participants had their voices recorded and they answered questionnaires before and after the workshops. The results of this study pointed significant smoothing accent for participants after their participation in both workshops, and there was no statistical difference between the telepractice and face-to-face approach.

The present thesis deals with rhythmic differences between Welsh English and the British Standard. It focuses on the varieties spoken in Cardiff and Aberystwyth in particular. The first part of the theoretical chapter summarises the approaches towards rhythm from the physiological, acoustic, perceptual, and phonological perspectives. The second part provides a basic description of the British Standard, Welsh, and Welsh English. It concerns itself with the existing information related to the subject matter especially as regards Welsh varieties of English. The last, third part, serves as an overview of the most common approaches towards the search of the acoustic correlates of rhythm (%V, ∆C, ∆V, PVI, varco, RR, YARD). The following chapters of the thesis present a material based study of the data obtained for the purposes of the thesis. The segmentation was carried out according to the principles proposed by Machač and Skarnitzl 2009. Rhythm was measured for four respondents for each selected location of Wales. The age span was 35-39 years for the group from Cardiff and 29-39 for that from Aberystwyth. The values measured were compared with the research of Volín and Pollák from 2009, which, among other things, provided the results of the rhythmic values for %V and ∆C for the British Standard on the...

I would like to understand what kinds of connections exist between musical rhythm and poetic and linguistic rhythm, particularly the phenomenon of accent, so I investigated accent in art songs, examining twelve songs in an attempt to further understand how and if the accents and patterns found in poetry correlate to those found in songs based on this poetry. This study examines how the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in Lieder by Amy Beach, Richard Strauss, and Camille Saint-Saëns correlate with musical rhythmic and accent patterns in the resulting music. I systematically determined what kinds of accents were present, where they were present, and how they were related. I tracked nine different types of musical accents: agogic, contour, dynamic, articulation, metric, pitch, phrasing, structural, and textural. I then tracked the linguistic accents in the poems themselves, with the categories of meter, individual word stresses (if different from the meter), rhyme scheme, internal rhymes, and cadences (ends of sentences and questions). I then compared the accents found in the music to the accents found in the poetry. I then compared the correlation of linguistic and musical accents through graphic representation of the values I found. I found significant correlation between musical and linguistic accents in the twelve different pieces I studied. These results suggest that, for at least these three composers, the text does in fact influence the accent patterns of the music. For the songs of Beach and Strauss, there is a visual pattern in the graphs, which matches the meter of the text. The linguistic and musical accent patterns in both Beach and Strauss songs tended to be regularly alternating in a binary fashion, in keeping with the iambic meter. For Saint-Saëns, there was overall close correlation as well. The main difference between graphs for Saint-Saëns and the others seems to be the lack of a pattern in the relative accent strengths, which can be found in both the English and German graphs. French poetry does not have an iambic pattern to it; correspondingly the music doesn't show the regular binary alteration of accents. This pattern or lack thereof is part of the correlation that all of the pieces share between the music and the language, and the lack of pattern seems to demonstrate a particularity in the music in the case of French. Though showing how accents in music and text correlate in the songs of English-, German-, and French-speaking composers, this thesis does not fully determine how and if musical and linguistic accents correlate in music composers other than Amy Beach, Richard Strauss, and Camille Saint-Saëns.

Cette thèse est une étude sur les quatre règles de base qui pourraient constituer un corpus cohérent pour l'enseignement du breton. Les trois premières, concernant les mots en eux-mêmes, sont présentées dans le premier volume : accent tonique, longueur sous l'accent et dévoisement de la consonne en finale absolue. La proposition d'un accent unique standard est la clef réaliste qui permet de donner cohérence à l'ensemble. Le second volume traite des phénomènes de sandhi. Après une large enquête menée dans les écoles bilingues du CE2 au Lycée, de Mai 2007 à Avril 2008, on constate une pénétration importante du modèle français dans la prononciation scolaire. Sont mis en évidence plusieurs points faibles de l'enseignement du breton : 1) plus de 50% des ouvrages répertoriés ne mentionnent pas la question des liaisons, fonctionnant pourtant le plus souvent à l'inverse du français. 2) Ce qui intervient pour beaucoup dans l'extension des liaisons “à la française” chez les apprenants, est la différence faite à la finale, depuis 1901, entre les substantifs et les autres espèces de mots. Cette décision, qui ne tenait pas compte de l'existence de deux sortes de suffixes en breton, les neutres et les durcissants, entraîne en effet une multiplication artificielle des consonnes sourdes visuelles en finales. On peut mesurer aujourd'hui les conséquences de cette décision sur le terrain. 3) Outre son impact sur les liaisons compte-tenu de l'effet Buben, la décision de 1901, reconduite jusqu'à l'accord orthographique de 1941, désorganise aussi le décodage de la longueur de la voyelle sous l'accent dans bon nombre de mots, autres que les substantifs. La thèse pose donc clairement la question de la pertinence de cette règle vieille de plus d'un siècle, à l'heure où l'enseignement du breton tente de se structurer

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how museums, seen as heterotopic places where time and space act simultaneously, can, with the help of museum educators and guides, integrate the foreign citizens in Sweden. The analysis is done with the help of three institutions: The Vasa Museum, the Royal Armory and The Great Synagogue in Stockholm.</p><p>The author of the thesis argues that recruiting trained personnel with foreign roots by museums would help significantly in the creation of a sense of collective identity and belonging among those citizens who are just adapting to the country. Through the use of Swedish, in conjunction with their mother tongue, as well as analogies, an important contribution can be attained in their integration.</p><p>In this work, concepts such as the accent, are treated in a categorical manner, as the author, with the assistance of other researchers, concluded that the accent should not influence the perception of the intellectual and work capability of a professional museum educator/guide.</p><p>History represents another key element in this thesis, as it discusses the way to find a new narrative form to channel history and refer to it, thus sharing historical roots with these new immigrants in Sweden.</p>

<p>The aim of this paper is to explore the features that combine to make up the distinctive accent of the actor Sir Sean Connery. This study outlines the subject’s basic vowel system and compares it to data collected on the vowel systems of Received Pronunciation (RP) and Scottish Standard English (SSE) from previous research (Stuart-Smith 1999, Hawkins & Midgely 2005, Fisk 2006). Furthermore, this essay examines the degree to which other elements associated with SSE are present in the subject’s accent. These features include the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (SVLR), the presence of dark /l/, rhoticity and T-glottalling. It is hypothesised that the subject speaks a modified variety of SSE yet retains the aforementioned qualities typically associated with SSE.</p><p>The speech analysis software programs Wavesurfer (version 1.4.7.) and Praat (version 4.4.33.) were used to analyse sections of sound taken from a speech given by the subject at an awards ceremony. Instrumental analysis of this nature was deemed appropriate in order to establish a high degree of objectivity in this study. Of the wide range of recorded material available the subject’s acceptance speech was judged most suitable for analysis. This is a passage of spontaneous speech as opposed to a movie script, where the subject talks of his background and career.</p><p>Having analysed the subject’s accent in this way, certain sociolinguistic implications can be drawn. The results suggest that Sir Sean Connery does indeed speak a variety of SSE however rather surprisingly the subject’s accent appears quite typical of his Edinburgh origins. The vowel system not only identifies the subject as an SSE speaker but also indicates traces of his working-class background e.g., the frontal quality to Connery’s realisation of /u/ and his low /I/ are typical of a working-class SSE speaker. Moreover, the general low quality found in Connery’s basic vowel system can be interpreted as revealing a little of his working-class origins.</p><p>Evidence of the other features associated with SSE was also found in the subject’s accent. Durational evidence indicates (albeit tentatively at this stage) that the SVLR operates within his accent while dark /l/ and t-glottalling were also observed.</p><p>While it is also apparent that Connery speaks a rhotic variety of English it is the nature and variety of his /r/ production that is most interesting. The subject appears to produce a retroflex realisation of /r/ which affects other consonants in its environment. This /r/ may be indicative of an earlier Irish influence over Connery’s accent.</p><p>It should be stated that due to the nature and the limited size of this study, all findings are preliminary and more research is needed into this area before any firm conclusions can be drawn.</p>

<p>Humans have the ability to recognize other humans by voice alone. This is important both socially and for the robustness of speech perception. This Thesis contains a set of eight studies that investigates how different factors impact on speaker recognition and how these factors can help explain how listeners perceive and evaluate speaker identity. The first study is a review paper overviewing emotion decoding and encoding research. The second study compares the relative importance of the emotional tone in the voice and the emotional content of the message. A mismatch between these was shown to impact upon decoding speed. The third study investigates the factor dialect in speaker recognition and shows, using a bidialectal speaker as the target voice to control all other variables, that the dominance of dialect cannot be overcome. The fourth paper investigates if imitated stage dialects are as perceptually dominant as natural dialects. It was found that a professional actor could disguise his voice successfully by imitating a dialect, yet that a listener's proficiency in a language or accent can reduce susceptibility to a dialect imitation. Papers five to seven focus on automatic techniques for speaker separation. Paper five shows that a method developed for Australian English diphthongs produced comparable results with a Swedish glide + vowel transition. The sixth and seventh papers investigate a speaker separation technique developed for American English. It was found that the technique could be used to separate Swedish speakers and that it is robust against professional imitations. Paper eight investigates how age and hearing impact upon earwitness reliability. This study shows that a senior citizen with corrected hearing can be as reliable an earwitness as a younger adult with no hearing problem, but suggests that a witness' general cognitive skill deterioration needs to be considered when assessing a senior citizen's earwitness evidence. On the basis of the studies a model of speaker recognition is presented, based on the face recognition model by V. Bruce and Young (1986; British Journal of Psychology, 77, pp. 305 - 327) and the voice recognition model by Belin, Fecteau and Bédard (2004; TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 8, pp. 129 - 134). The merged and modified model handles both familiar and unfamiliar voices. The findings presented in this Thesis, in particular the findings of the individual papers in Part II, have implications for criminal cases in which speaker recognition forms a part. The findings feed directly into the growing body of forensic phonetic and forensic linguistic research.</p>