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.

The subject of my graduation is an analyse of the language of Šimon Lomnický z Budče in his publication Instrukcí aneb Krátké naučení hospodáře mladého... (1586). The thesis reports about the characteristic of phonetic, formative and lexical side of his language. The main attention is devoted to the word-stock and its analyse from different points of view including the phraseology. The purpose of the thesis is an evaluation of the language of Šimon Lomnický as a representative of the period language at the turn of 16th and 17th century.

A entoação pode ser decomposta em componentes estruturadoras (finalização e sustentação) e, também, semântico-funcionais (foco/ênfase e acento lexical). A proposta assumida pelo grupo de pesquisa ExProsodia, baseada nos estudos de Xu e Wang (1997), permite a análise isolada de cada uma das componentes de F0. Neste estudo tratamos das componentes estruturadoras, especificamente, do estudo da finalização (F). O trabalho tem como objetivo, primeiro, analisar por meio de testes de percepção o que os sujeitos falantes do português brasileiro (doravante PB) julgam ser um final de frase assertiva. Depois, é nosso propósito analisar se os dados perceptivos fornecidos pelos ouvintes coincidem com aqueles disponibilizados pela análise automática obtida por meio da rotina ExProsodia®. É nosso intento, ainda, verificar se, no que tange à percepção dos procedimentos de segmentação frasal com propósito de finalização, é observada a sequência finalizadora proposta por Ferreira Netto (2008), acrescida da hipótese de Consoni et al (2009) e Consoni (2011). Este estudo visa integrar a coletânea de trabalhos desenvolvidos pelo Grupo de pesquisa ExProsodia - Análise automática da entoação na fala de língua portuguesa, linha de pesquisa na área de Percepção de Prosódia sob a orientação do Prof. Dr. Waldemar Ferreira Netto. Elaboramos dois testes. No primeiro teste foram apresentadas nove frases (três frases sem manipulação e seis manipuladas). As frases não manipuladas são, ao longo deste trabalho, mencionadas como frases modelos. As seis frases manipuladas foram subdivididas em dois conjuntos de três frases cada: a de frases monotonais e as frases manipuladas de modo que entre o tom médio (TM) e o tom de finalização (TF) houvesse uma distância de 7st. Nomeamos as primeiras frases como frases neutras e as segundas, frases hipóteses. No segundo teste foram apresentadas seis frases (somente as frases manipuladas, ou seja, as frases neutras e as frases hipóteses). Cada vez que o participante ouvia uma frase era solicitado a este que indicasse se a frase, de acordo com a sua percepção, estava ou não finalizada. Foram dadas duas opções de resposta aos ouvintes: sim, a frase está finalizada ou não, a frase não está finalizada. Os testes foram aplicados em 20 ouvintes de ambos os sexos, com idade entre 18 e 55 anos, todos com escolaridade entre nível médio e nível superior. Os resultados do teste 1 indiciam que as porcentagens dos ouvintes que consideram as frases neutras como não finalizadas sempre foram altas e mantiveram-se, em sua grande maioria, na casa dos 80%. Ademais, o produto da análise das frases hipóteses corrobora os dados dos trabalhos já citados. (CONSONI; FERREIRA NETTO, 2008; CONSONI et al., 2008; CONSONI et al., 2009 e CONSONI, 2011; FERREIRA NETTO, 2006, 2008; ROSA 2009). A análise do teste 2 fora efetuada por meio da teoria da detecção de sinais (TDS) (GREEN; SWETS, 1966; MACMILLAN; CREELMAN, 2005; ADBI, 2007). Ao fazer uso da TDS, pretendemos estimar a força da sensibilidade perceptiva de cada participante do teste 2. O valor dessa força é dada pelo cálculo do dee-prime. Os resultados do teste 2 apontaram dee-primes de três categorias diferentes, a saber: alto; médio e baixo. As respostas da grande maioria dos participantes situaram-se entre uma facilidade extrema e média de discriminar as frases finalizadas e as não finalizadas. / The intonation can be decomposed into structuring components (finalization and support component) and also semantic-functional components (focus / emphasis and lexical stress). The proposal assumed by ExProsodia rechearch group, based on the studies of Xu and Wang (1997), it allows separate analysis of each component of F0. In this study we treat structuring components, specifically, the study of finalization (F). The study aims, first, to analyze through perception tests which Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth PB) speakers think that is the ending of declarative sentences. It is our intent also verify if the finalization sequence proposed by Ferreira Netto (2008), plus the assumption of Consoni et al. (2009) e Consoni (2011) is observed. And lastly, our purpose is to inspect whether perceptual data match with those provided by automatic analysis obtained by routine ExProsodia®. This study aims to integrate a collection of work done by the research group ExProsodia - Automatic analysis of intonation in the speech of the Portuguese language, research line in the area of Perception of Prosody under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Waldemar Ferreira Netto. We developed two tests. In the first test, nine sentences were presented to the Brazilian Portuguese listeners (three sentences without manipulation and six manipulated). Non-manipulated sentences, throughout this work, as mentioned as models sentences. The six manipulated sentences were subdivided into two groups of three sentences each one: the monotonous sentences and manipulated sentences. The last one is manipulated so that between the medium tone (MT) and the finalization tone (FT) there is a distance of 7 semitones. We named first sentences as neutral sentences and the others as hypothesis sentences. At the second test, six sentences (only manipulated sentences, i.e. neutral sentences and hypothesis sentences) were presented to Brazilian Portuguese listeners. Each time the participant heard a sentence, he was requested to indicate whether that sentence, according to their perception, or was not finalized. Two response options were given to listeners: yes, the sentence is finished or not, the sentence is not finished. 20 listeners of both sexes, aged between 18 and 55 years, all with education among middle and senior level have participated of the test. The test results indicate that percentages of listeners who consider neutral sentences as unfinished sentences were always high and remained, mostly at around 80%. Moreover, the product of the analysis of hypothesis sentences corroborates data of the work already cited. (CONSONI; FERREIRA NETTO, 2008; CONSONI et al., 2008; CONSONI et al., 2009 e CONSONI, 2011; FERREIRA NETTO, 2006, 2008; ROSA 2009). The analysis of the test 2 has carried out by the signal detection theory (SDT) (GREEN; SWETS, 1966; MACMILLAN; Creelman, 2005; ADBI, 2007). By making use of the TDS, we intend to estimate the strength of the perceptual sensitivity of each participant of the test 2. Results showed dee-primes in three different categories, namely: high; medium and low. The responses of the majority of participants were between one extreme and mean facility to discriminate the finished and unfinished sentences.

Although familiarity with a talker or accent is known to facilitate perception, it is not clear what underlies this phenomenon. Previous research has focused primarily on whether listeners can learn to associate novel phonetic characteristics with low-level units such as features or phonemes. However, this neglects the potential role of phonetic information at many other levels of representation. To address this shortcoming, this thesis investigated perceptual learning of systematic phonetic detail relating to higher levels of linguistic structure, including prosodic, grammatical and morphological contexts. Furthermore, in contrast to many previous studies, this research used relatively natural stimuli and tasks, thus maximising its relevance to perceptual learning in ordinary listening situations. This research shows that listeners can update their phonetic representations in response to incoming information and its relation to linguistic-structural context. In addition, certain patterns of systematic phonetic detail were more learnable than others. These findings are used to inform an account of how new information is integrated with prior experience in speech processing, within a framework that emphasises the importance of phonetic detail at multiple levels of representation.

The present study was designed to examine differences between subtypes of readers and spellers in their performance on several phonological, orthographic, and memory tasks. A central question involved whether subtypes of readers and spellers could be distinguished based on their performance across the tasks administered. Based on their performance on a standardized achievement test, fourth and fifth grade children (N=50) were classified as having no difficulties with reading and spelling (good readers and spellers), difficulties with spelling, but not reading (mixed readers and spellers), or difficulties with both reading and spelling (poor readers and spellers). Each student was given a series of tasks to assess their use of phonological and orthographic information for memory and spelling. These tasks included: 1) rhyme judgment, 2) cued recall, 3) reading pronounceable pseudowords, 4) deciding which of. two pseudowords looks most like a real word, and 5) reporting on the kinds of strategies used to spell words. An error analysis was also conducted. Students with reading and spelling difficulties performed consistently lower than good and mixed readers and spellers on tasks assessing their use of phonological information. Good and mixed readers and spellers were not distinguishable on these tasks. Students with no reading and spelling difficulties or with spelling difficulties only performed better than poor readers and spellers on some tasks assessing orthographic processing. Specifically, mixed readers and spellers were distinguishable from good readers and spellers by their poorer recall of visually similar words. Good and poor subtypes were not distinguishable on this task. Poor readers and spellers also achieved comparable scores to the good and mixed readers and spellers on a measure of orthographic awareness. Overall results provided evidence supporting subtypes of reading and spelling ability groups. Students with no reading and spelling difficulties, or difficulties with spelling but not reading were similar in their use of phonological information. However, students with reading and spelling difficulties were more similar to the good readers and spellers in their use of orthographic information in memory. The findings from the present study have implications to subsequent research examining spelling ability, provide further evidence of the unique processing characteristics of the paradoxical good reader but poor speller, and suggest the possibility of unique programming needs to remediate spelling difficulties in mixed and poor readers and spellers. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The problem of this study is to evaluate the program of phonetic teaching in the Panola County schools in terms of criteria developed from current literature on the history, theories, and studies relating to the teaching of phonics in connection with the reading program in the elementary grades.

In this dissertation, new approaches in the design of a voice transformation (VT) system for Turkish are proposed. Objectives in this thesis are two-fold. The first objective is to develop standard speech corpora and segmentation tools for Turkish speech research. The second objective is to consider new approaches for VT. A triphone-balanced set of 2462 Turkish sentences is prepared for analysis. An audio corpus of 100 speakers, each uttering 40 sentences out of the 2462-sentence set, is used to train a speech recognition system designed for English. This system is ported to Turkish to obtain a phonetic aligner and a phoneme recognizer. The triphone-balanced sentence set and the phonetic aligner are used to develop a speech corpus for VT. A new voice transformation approach based on Mixed Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) speech coding framework is proposed. Multi-stage vector quantization of MELP is used to obtain speaker-specific line-spectral frequency (LSF) codebooks for source and target speakers. Histograms mapping the LSF spaces of source and target speakers are used for transformation in the baseline system. The baseline system is improved by a dynamic programming approach to estimate the target LSFs. As a second approach to the VT problem, quantizing the LSFs using k-means clustering algorithm is applied with dimension reduction of LSFs using principle component analysis. This approach provides speaker-specific codebooks out of the speech corpus instead of using MELP&#039 / s pre-trained LSF codebook. Evaluations show that both dimension reduction and dynamic programming improve the transformation performance.