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Previous research indicates that humans develop a phonological library in infancy. As humans grow into adulthood, their phonological library becomes well established. Upon encountering phonemes from a new language, humans process these phonemes by comparison to their native phonological library. Event-related potentials (ERP), specifically the mismatch negativity, have been shown to indicate that this process of comparing non-native phonemes to our native phonological library is not improved through learning the new language as an adult. An alternative explanation may be that there is an underlying change in the neural generators as the non-native phonemes are learned, but that this change is not reflected in the ERP. The current study seeks to examine this hypothesis through the simultaneous collection of ERP and blood-oxygen-level-dependent functional MRI (fMRI) data. The findings of the ERP and fMRI data are inconclusive. The study also explores the processing of diphthongs, a category of phonemes rarely tested before, through both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. The study presents behavioral data demonstrating that non-native diphthongs are processed based upon the separate elements of the phonemes, rather than as complete units.

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This dissertation is an analysis of the segmental phonology of the Shangani language as spoken in the South Eastern parts of Zimbabwe. It starts by presenting the language situation in Zimbabwe and comparing the language’s status in Zimbabwe with that of its sister varieties in South Africa where it is referred to as Tsonga and in Mozambique where it is referred to as XiChangana or Changana. The dissertation is based on data collected from the speakers of Shangani using a variety of research techniques. The dissertation identifies and characterizes the language’s distinctive phonemes using the minimal pair and set tests. It presents the language’s consonants, which include aspirated, breathy-voiced, pre-nasalized, labialized and palatalized consonants. It shows that in Shangani, voiceless consonants cannot be pre-nasalized and that there is an incompatibility between that labio-velar glide /w/ and most labial consonants excpt /m/. The phonemes are analysed using Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) distinctive feature theory. The study uses Clements and Keyser’s (1983) CV phonology of the syllable structure to analyse the language’s syllable structure. The language’s canonical syllable structure is CV. It is also shown that consonant clusters are gaining their way into the language through borrowing from English, Afrikaans and other languages that have consonant clusters in their inventories. Onsetless Vs are marginally attested word-initially. In agent nouns, VV sequences are in most cases retained. These sequences are not analysed as diphthongs since they occupy different V slots on the syllable tier. The second vowel in the sequence is the onsetless syllable. Affricates, NCs, Cws and Cjs are presented as unitary segments that occupy a single C slot of the CV tier. Phonological processes that are attested in the language are also presented. Secondary articulation, vowel deletion, feature spreading, vowel coalescence and nasalization are shown to be the most common phonological process in the language. Since Shangani has the CV syllable typology, most of the phonological processes are there to resolve hiatus that would have been induced by suffixation of vowel commencing stems or suffixes to vowel final prefixes or stems. The notion of domains is shown to be a diagnostic tool for identifying a process in a hiatus situation. The study shows that vowel deletion is the least preferred strategy when secondary articulation, feature spreading, vowel coalescence have been blocked by some constraints like syllable structure processes or the language’s phonotactics / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

This dissertation is an analysis of the segmental phonology of the Shangani language as spoken in the South Eastern parts of Zimbabwe. It starts by presenting the language situation in Zimbabwe and comparing the language’s status in Zimbabwe with that of its sister varieties in South Africa where it is referred to as Tsonga and in Mozambique where it is referred to as XiChangana or Changana. The dissertation is based on data collected from the speakers of Shangani using a variety of research techniques. The dissertation identifies and characterizes the language’s distinctive phonemes using the minimal pair and set tests. It presents the language’s consonants, which include aspirated, breathy-voiced, pre-nasalized, labialized and palatalized consonants. It shows that in Shangani, voiceless consonants cannot be pre-nasalized and that there is an incompatibility between that labio-velar glide /w/ and most labial consonants excpt /m/. The phonemes are analysed using Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) distinctive feature theory. The study uses Clements and Keyser’s (1983) CV phonology of the syllable structure to analyse the language’s syllable structure. The language’s canonical syllable structure is CV. It is also shown that consonant clusters are gaining their way into the language through borrowing from English, Afrikaans and other languages that have consonant clusters in their inventories. Onsetless Vs are marginally attested word-initially. In agent nouns, VV sequences are in most cases retained. These sequences are not analysed as diphthongs since they occupy different V slots on the syllable tier. The second vowel in the sequence is the onsetless syllable. Affricates, NCs, Cws and Cjs are presented as unitary segments that occupy a single C slot of the CV tier. Phonological processes that are attested in the language are also presented. Secondary articulation, vowel deletion, feature spreading, vowel coalescence and nasalization are shown to be the most common phonological process in the language. Since Shangani has the CV syllable typology, most of the phonological processes are there to resolve hiatus that would have been induced by suffixation of vowel commencing stems or suffixes to vowel final prefixes or stems. The notion of domains is shown to be a diagnostic tool for identifying a process in a hiatus situation. The study shows that vowel deletion is the least preferred strategy when secondary articulation, feature spreading, vowel coalescence have been blocked by some constraints like syllable structure processes or the language’s phonotactics / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Aim, of this master thesis is training of phoneme recognizer with phoneme set, which have been made by merging of several phoneme sets, which are containted in SpeechDat-E database and find out if this kind of recognizer will have better results than recognizers which were trained on one language. This work also deals with phoneme sets, principles of phoneme recognition using recognizers based on artifical neural networks, language identification and merging of given phoneme sets. Also is described process of training phoneme recognizer and phoneme recognition.

Färdigheten att avkoda ord är en grundläggande förutsättning för förmågan att läsa och har därmed en avgörande roll i elevers läsutveckling. Framgångsrik undervisning krävs för att eleverna ska ges möjlighet och förutsättningar att utveckla färdigheten att avkoda, det vill säga förståelse för sambandet mellan fonem och grafem. Med detta som utgångspunkt är syftet med studien att undersöka hur sju lärare i årskurs 1 beskriver att de utformar undervisningen i avkodning för att skapa förutsättningar för att eleverna ska utveckla färdigheten att avkoda ord. Studien utgår från en kvalitativ forskningsansats samt ett sociokulturellt perspektiv på lärande och utveckling. Empiriskt material har samlats in genom semi-strukturerade intervjuer där totalt sju lärare i årskurs 1 medverkade. Lärarna var slumpvis utvalda från olika skolor i två medelstora städer i Sverige. Resultatet visar att lärare använder olika medierande verktyg i form av digitala redskap, läromedel och aktiviteter i undervisningen, där samtalet och det sociala samspelet får stort utrymme. Det framkommer även att lärare använder sig själv som verktyg i avkodningsundervisningen där läraren stöttar, utmanar och fungerar som förebild för eleverna.  Vid utformandet av undervisningen framgår dessutom att forskning och beprövad erfarenhet samt elevers olika förutsättningar är någonting lärare förhåller sig till. Resultatet synliggör att undervisning kring avkodning varierar mellan olika lärare eftersom elevers individuella behov ligger till grund vid val av verktyg och vid utformningen av undervisningen. / Decoding skills are a crucial part of students reading development, since the ability to decode words is a fundamental qualification for reading. To give the pupils the opportunity to develop knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, an effective instruction is required. In light of this, the purpose of this paper is to examine how first grade teachers describe how they design instruction to create conditions for the students to develop decoding skills. The paper is based on a qualitative research approach and a socio-cultural perspective on learning and development. Through semi-structured interviews, empirical material has been collected from a total of seven participating first grade teachers. The teachers were randomly selected from different schools in two medium-sized cities in Sweden. The results show that teachers use mediating tools in form of digital gears, teaching materials and activities, where social interaction is emphasized. Teachers also function as tools, because they support, challenge and serve as role models for the pupils. Furthermore, the results reveal that research and proven experience as well as pupils’ different pre-conditions and needs affect teachers when they create decoding instruction. The results show that pupils’ individual needs are the starting point when teachers choose tools and create decoding instruction, which is why decoding instruction varies between different teachers.

Thesis (MScEng (Electrical and Electronic Engineering))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Statistical speech recognition systems typically utilise a set of statistical models of subword units based on the set of phonemes in a target language. However, in continuous speech it is important to consider co-articulation e ects and the interactions between neighbouring sounds, as over-generalisation of the phonetic models can negatively a ect system accuracy. Traditionally co-articulation in continuous speech is handled by incorporating contextual information into the subword model by means of context-dependent models, which exponentially increase the number of subword models. In contrast, transitional models aim to handle co-articulation by modelling the interphone dynamics found in the transitions between phonemes. This research aimed to perform an objective analysis of diphones as subword units for use in hidden Markov model-based continuous-speech recognition systems, with special emphasis on a direct comparison to a context-dependent biphone-based system in terms of complexity, accuracy and computational e ciency in similar parametric conditions. To simulate practical conditions, the experiments were designed to evaluate these systems in a low resource environment { limited supply of training data, computing power and system memory { while still attempting fast, accurate phoneme recognition. Adaptation techniques designed to exploit characteristics inherent in diphones, as well as techniques used for e ective parameter estimation and state-level tying were used to reduce resource requirements while simultaneously increasing parameter reliability. These techniques include diphthong splitting, utilisation of a basic diphone grammar, diphone set completion, maximum a posteriori estimation and decision-tree based state clustering algorithms. The experiments were designed to evaluate the contribution of each adaptation technique individually and subsequently compare the optimised diphone-based recognition system to a biphone-based recognition system that received similar treatment. Results showed that diphone-based recognition systems perform better than both traditional phoneme-based systems and context-dependent biphone-based systems when evaluated in similar parametric conditions. Therefore, diphones are e ective subword units, which carry suprasegmental knowledge of speech signals and provide an excellent compromise between detailed co-articulation modelling and acceptable system performance