Machines that can talk and listen have been part of historical tradition since antiquity. Dresden also boasts one of the legendary “speaking heads”, which is said to have been made around 1700 by the versatile vice-rector of the “Kreuzschule”, Johann Valentin Merbitz. However, it was not until the Age of Enlightenment, under the influence of Leonhard Euler, that serious scientific attempts were made to build “speaking machines”. One of these, constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen and described in 1791, has rightly become famous. Its creator presented it on one of his lecture tours in Dresden in 1784, and today a replica from 2009 enhances the Acoustic-Phonetic Collection of the TUD Dresden University of Technology. It was a long road, then, to the establishment of the field that is referred to today as natural language human-machine interaction or more simply as speech. Its development would not have been possible at all without the accompanying preliminary work in electronics and computer technology. At universities, the field was institutionalized in different ways, with its interdisciplinary nature rooted in very different disciplines, such as phonetics, physiology, perceptual psychology, acoustics, communications engineering, and computer science. In Dresden, speech technology emerged as part of weak current engineering. At present, this field is called information technology and has its own collection: the “elektron” Collection.

No description available.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to closely investigate and describe selected phonetic properties of Czech oral plosives [p t ť k b d ď g] in normal speech. The re- search focuses mostly on temporal characteristics in various contexts; moreover, we deal with the possible manners of plosive articulation in Czech, including non-canonical realizations. Another important part of the present study is a comparison with earlier studies. In the domain of temporal characteristics we examine the influence of various contexts on phone duration. The contexts include: phonetic context, speaker gender, the position of the plosive in the stress unit or articulation rate. We also examine a possible connection between the duration of the plosive and its realization. In the part that deals with the manner of articulation we focus on the individual phonetic properties, for which we investigate especially the conditions and degree of their stability. Furthermore we describe the specific plosive articulations in certain pho- netic contexts and some alternative realizations of certain plosives. The speech material used is mostly spontaneous. All the speakers are non- professionals from various TV broadcasts. Keywords: plosives, duration, phone segmentation, phonetic properties, pho- netic context, gender, articulation...

Lam Wai Yung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-133). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Table of contents --- p.v / Chapter Chapter 1 --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter 1 .1 --- Background --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Purposes of The Study --- p.7 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- Phonological Awareness and Reading --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Word recognition and reading --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Relationship between phonological awareness and reading performance --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Two Views About Levels of Phonological Awareness --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Linear view of levels of phonological awareness --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Hierarchical view of levels of phonological awareness --- p.14 / Chapter 2.3 --- Measurement of Phonological Awareness --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Various task types --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Various levels of difficulty of phonological tasks --- p.22 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Task analysis studies --- p.23 / Chapter 2.4 --- Development of Levels of Phonological Awareness --- p.26 / Chapter 2.4.1 --- Developmental sequence of phonological awareness --- p.26 / Chapter 2.4.2 --- Underlying reasons for the sequential development --- p.29 / Chapter 2.5 --- Levels of Phonological Awareness and Reading --- p.30 / Chapter 2.5.1 --- Syllable awareness and English reading --- p.31 / Chapter 2.5.2 --- Phoneme awareness and English reading --- p.32 / Chapter 2.5.3 --- Onset-rime awareness and English reading --- p.34 / Chapter 2.6 --- Chinese Reading English as A Second Language --- p.39 / Chapter 2.6.1 --- Orthographic and phonological differences between Chinese and English --- p.39 / Chapter 2.6.2 --- Influence of learning Chinese on phonological awareness - --- p.41 / Chapter 2.6.3 --- Phonological awareness development in Chinese children - --- p.44 / Chapter 2.6.4 --- Effects of first language learning on reading English --- p.49 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- METHOD --- p.54 / Chapter 3.1 --- Subjects --- p.54 / Chapter 3.2 --- Tasks --- p.55 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Syllable level tasks --- p.57 / Chapter 3.2.1.1 --- Syllable detection --- p.57 / Chapter 3.2.1.2 --- Syllable deletion --- p.58 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Onset-rime level tasks --- p.58 / Chapter 3.2.2.1 --- Onset-rime detection --- p.58 / Chapter 3.2.2.2 --- Onset-rime deletion - --- p.59 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Phoneme level tasks --- p.60 / Chapter 3.2.3.1 --- Phoneme detection --- p.60 / Chapter 3.2.3.2 --- Phoneme deletion - --- p.61 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Word recognition test --- p.62 / Chapter 3.2.5 --- The Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices --- p.62 / Chapter 3.3 --- Procedure --- p.63 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- RESULTS --- p.64 / Chapter 4.1 --- Descriptive Data --- p.64 / Chapter 4.2 --- Patterns of Phonological Awareness --- p.66 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- The performance of three graders in the tasks of three levels of phonological awareness --- p.66 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Patterns of phonological development --- p.76 / Chapter 4.3 --- Measuring Phonological Awareness: Detection Vs. Deletion --- p.82 / Chapter 4.4 --- Predicting English Word Reading Performance --- p.92 / Chapter 4.5 --- Summary of Results --- p.95 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- DISCUSSION --- p.98 / Chapter 5.1 --- Patterns of Phonological Awareness --- p.98 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Progressive development in phonological awareness over grade --- p.98 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- The characteristics of phonological development in Hong Kong children --- p.103 / Chapter 5.1.3 --- Developmental progression from large via medium to small units --- p.107 / Chapter 5.2 --- Measurement of Phonological Awareness --- p.110 / Chapter 5.3 --- Phonological Awareness and Word Reading --- p.114 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS --- p.120 / Chapter 6.1 --- Major Findings --- p.120 / Chapter 6.1.1 --- Patterns of phonological awareness --- p.120 / Chapter 6.1.2 --- Measurement of phonological awareness --- p.120 / Chapter 6.1.3 --- Phonological awareness in predicting English reading --- p.121 / Chapter 6.2 --- Limitations --- p.122 / Chapter 6.3 --- Implications and Recommendations --- p.123 / Chapter 5.6.1 --- Pedagogical implications --- p.123 / Chapter 5.6.2 --- Future research recommendations --- p.124 / References --- p.126 / Appendixes --- p.134

Le développement d'un système de reconnaissance de la parole exige la disponibilité d'une grande quantité de ressources à savoir, grands corpus de texte et de parole, un dictionnaire de prononciation. Néanmoins, ces ressources ne sont pas disponibles directement pour des dialectes arabes. De ce fait, le développement d'un SRAP pour les dialectes arabes se heurte à de multiples difficultés à savoir, l’'abence de grandes quantités de ressources et l'absence d’'une orthographe standard vu que ces dialectes sont parlés et non écrit. Dans cette perspective, les travaux de cette thèse s’intègrent dans le cadre du développement d’un SRAP pour le dialecte tunisien. Une première partie des contributions consiste à développer une variante de CODA (Conventional Orthography for Arabic Dialectal) pour le dialecte tunisien. En fait, cette convention est conçue dans le but de fournir une description détaillée des directives appliquées au dialecte tunisien. Compte tenu des lignes directives de CODA, nous avons constitué notre corpus nommé TARIC : Corpus de l’interaction des chemins de fer de l’arabe tunisien dans le domaine de la SNCFT. Outre ces ressources, le dictionnaire de prononciation s’impose d’une manière indispensable pour le développement d’un SRAP. À ce propos, dans la deuxième partie des contributions, nous visons la création d’un système nommé conversion (Graphème-Phonème) G2P qui permet de générer automatiquement ce dictionnaire phonétique. Toutes ces ressources décrites avant sont utilisées pour adapter un SRAP pour le MSA du laboratoire LIUM au dialecte tunisien dans le domaine de la SNCFT. L’évaluation de notre système donné lieu WER de 22,6% sur l’ensemble de test. / The development of a speech recognition system requires the availability of a large amount of resources namely, large corpora of text and speech, a dictionary of pronunciation. Nevertheless, these resources are not available directly for Arabic dialects. As a result, the development of a SRAP for Arabic dialects is fraught with many difficulties, namely the lack of large amounts of resources and the absence of a standard spelling as these dialects are spoken and not written. In this perspective, the work of this thesis is part of the development of a SRAP for the Tunisian dialect. A first part of the contributions consists in developing a variant of CODA (Conventional Orthography for Arabic Dialectal) for the Tunisian dialect. In fact, this convention is designed to provide a detailed description of the guidelines applied to the Tunisian dialect. Given the guidelines of CODA, we have created our corpus TARIC: Corpus of the interaction of the railways of the Tunisian Arab in the field of SNCFT. In addition to these resources, the pronunciation dictionary is indispensable for the development of a peech recognition system. In this regard, in the second part of the contributions, we aim at the creation of a system called conversion(Grapheme-Phonème) G2P which allows to automatically generate this phonetic dictionary. All these resources described before are used to adapt a SRAP for the MSA of the LIUM laboratory to the Tunisian dialect in the field of SNCFT. The evaluation of our system gave rise to WER of 22.6% on the test set.

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

TEACHING CHARACTER FORMATION RATIONALES WITH A COMPUTER-ASSISTED COURSEWARE FEBRURARY 2010 BO FENG, B.A., GUANGZHOU INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES M.A., EASTERN ILLILOIS UNIVERSITY M.F.A, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Zhongwei Shen This research conducts a literature survey in the areas of Chinese character error analysis; SLA theories in interlanguage and transfer; systemic characteristics of the Chinese writing system; as well as psycholinguist researches in Chinese character acquisition. CFL learners face critical issues in character acquisition, such as confusions caused by the lack of phonetic awareness, semantic awareness, and contextual interferences. In order to assist CFL learners cope with these issues effectively, it is necessary to develop a computer-assisted courseware utilizing multimedia and web technologies to turn character formation rationales into advance organizers which can be used by CFL learners to restructure newly acquired knowledge and skills. The courseware emphasizes enhancing phonetic awareness, while giving sufficient coverage for semantic awareness and preliminary concepts of spatial configuration of character components.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The Germanic initial sound combination wr (e.g. in *wrītan 'write') has not been preserved in any standard language. In the Scandinavian languages the development of this sound combination has resulted in five different initial sounds or sound combinations, namely rw, r, w, br and vr. The aim of this study is to describe the occurrence of these sound combinations, and to explain their age and origin. A limited number of words, mainly from Swedish dialects, has been investigated. The Swedish material has been assembled in a collection that has largely also been mapped, and so has a collection of Norwegian dialect material. The result shows that br is frequent in the Swedish dialects and that it also occurs in Trøndelagen and Østlandet in Norway, and on Jutland. R is widespread in Norway and occurs in Sweden in some words in Norrland, Dalarna, Värmland, Dalsland, Uppland and on the island of Gotland. Rw has been documented in Upper Dalarna, and w in the same area, as well as in the Kalix dialect in northernmost Sweden. The author demonstrates that the Norwegian loss of w might have started already in the 6th century in western Norway. The loss on Gotland is independent and can be demonstrated in Old Gutnish. The metathesis rw is found in Swedish and Norwegian 13-14th century sources from Uppland, Västmanland, Östergötland and southeastern Norway. The developments wr &gt; r and wr &gt; rw probably have their roots in a difference between the west Norwegian wr and the east Norwegian and Swedish war which is documented from PrimScand times. W is a secondary development of rw. The change wr &gt; br can be dated by place-name material to the early 15th century. The change wr &gt; vr appears to have taken place at approximately the same time. The author demonstrates that the result, wr &gt; br or wr &gt; yr, is apparently governed by certain phonetic factors. The failure of the Germanic wr to survive depends on the combination being phonetically complex. The risk that w would be lost was therefore considerable. However, differentiating forces worked for its retention. All developments emanating from wr, apparently disparate, can be seen as features of a larger process where a general linguistic tendency towards a weakening of sounds is confronted by conservative forces, with the above results as a consequence. / <p>Doktorsavhandling vid Uppsala universitet 1991</p>

VOTRAX is a commercially available voice synthesizer for use with a digital computer. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a VOTRAX terminal for use with the Fairchild F24 computer. Chapters of the thesis consider the audio response technology, some characteristics of Phonetic English Speech, configuration of hardware, and describe the PHONO computer program which was developed. The last chapter discusses the advantages of the VOTRAX voice synthesizer and proposes a future version of the system with a time-sharing host computer.