Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 63-70).

Thesis - Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht. / Summary in English: p. 264-270.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, May 4, 2001. Also available in print.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1996." Also available in print.

Thesis (M.Aud.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-101). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Στην παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία εκπονήθηκε ο δεύτερος κύκλος ανάπτυξης ενός διαδικτυακού συστήματος για την αξιολόγηση της φωνολογίας, της ανάγνωσης και της αφηγηματικής ικανότητας σε παιδιά προσχολικής ηλικίας. Η βασική ιδέα του συστήματος αυτού είναι η ηλεκτρονική συλλογή και οργάνωση πληροφοριών μιας απομακρυσμένης αξιολόγησης φωνολογικής ανάπτυξης παιδιών χωρίς να χρειαστεί να έχουν άμεση επαφή με έναν λογοθεραπευτή. Ο σκοπός χρήσης αυτού του συστήματος είναι η πρόληψη, η έγκαιρη αναγνώριση και αντιμετώπιση φωνολογικών προβλημάτων καθώς και η ευκολότερη διεξαγωγή μαζικών φωνολογικών αξιολογήσεων. Σε αυτόν τον κύκλο ανάπτυξης προστίθενται οι βασικές λειτουργίες που καθιστούν το σύστημα αυτόνομο και ικανό να αξιοποιηθεί για απομακρυσμένες φωνολογικές αξιολογήσεις και αναλύσεις των αποτελεσμάτων. / During this project was executed the second development cycle of an online system for the evaluation of the phonology, the reading and the narrating ability in children at preschool age. The basic idea of this system is the electronic collection and organization of information extracted from an evaluation of the phonetic growth of children without the presence of a logotherapist. The main goal of using this system is the prevention, recognition and confrontation of phonetic problems as well as the easier conduction of mass phonetic evaluations. In this development cycle were added the basic operations that made the system autonomous and capable of carrying out remote phonetic evaluations and analysis.

This study investigated the production of the English voiceless bilabial stop /p/ in three word positions (initial, medial, and final). By a group of 20 male and female ESL Saudi Arabian learners in the United States. The stimulus of this work was a list of 20 English words with an equal number of words for the three word positions initial, medial, and final. By measuring the Voice Onset Time in word initial and the duration of the release of the target phoneme /p/ in word medial and final positions this study identified several types of error in the participants’ utterances, including substitution of /p/ with /b/, approximation, and frication. The position of /p/ in words had a significant effect on the accuracy of pronunciation as the position that yielded the highest level of accuracy was the final position. The other two positions, initial and medial, showed a significantly higher number of production errors than word- final position.

The current dissertation is a systematic study of variation in the English spoken in multilingual and multicultural India. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of two native languages (Hindi and Telugu) on English, which is spoken by almost all Indians as a second language. The first experiment indicated that Indian English (IE) is accented by the first language of its speakers, but high English proficiency and the degree of divergence between the sound patterns of the speaker's native language and his or her IE suggested that other factors might influence the preservation of a native language accent in IE. The second experiment controlled for language investigated the effect of region on IE, finding that listeners were able to distinguish speakers based on region even when they spoke the same native language. The regional variation in IE was more noticeable for native Telugu speakers than for native Hindi speakers. This difference was attributed to differences in the social and political power associated with these native languages: Hindi being the national language and the language of the capital city of India; Telugu, a regional language of Andhra Pradesh and spoken by many fewer people than Hindi. The third experiment was motivated by the idea that persistent effects of the speaker's native language might also be used to reflect a speaker's personal identity. Accordingly, the experiment investigated the effect of speaking about personal versus neutral topics on IE pronunciation. The results were that speakers' IE pronunciation was more like their native language when speakers discussed personal topics then when they discussed neutral topics. Overall, the results suggest that the pronunciation of IE is conditioned by social factors, meaning that it has entered the differentiation phase of Schneider's dynamic model of English evolution. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.

This dissertation presents a cross-linguistic investigation of how nonnative sounds are perceived by second language (L2) learners in terms of their first language (L1) categories for an understudies language pair---Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Category mapping experiment empirically measured the perceived phonetic distances between Chinese sounds and their most resembling Japanese categories, which generated testable predictions on discriminability of Chinese sound contrasts according to Perception Assimilation Model (PAM). Category discrimination experiment obtained data concerning L2 learners' actual performance on discrimination Chinese sounds. The discrepancy between PAM's predictions and actual performances revealed that PAM cannot be applied to L2 perceptual learning. It was suggested that the discriminability of L2 sound contrasts was not only determined by perceived phonetic distances but probably involved other factors, such as the distinctiveness of certain phonetic features, e.g. aspiration and retroflexion. The training experiment assessed the improvement of L2 learners' performance in identifying Chinese sound contrasts with exposure to high variability stimuli and feedback. The results not only proved the effectiveness of training in shaping L2 learners' perception but showed that the training effects were generalizable to new tokens spoken by unfamiliar talkers. In addition to perception, the production of Chinese sounds by Japanese learners was also examined from the phonetic perspective in terms of perceived foreign accentedness. Regression of L2 learners' and native speakers foreign accentedness ratings against acoustic measurements of their speech production revealed that although both segmental and suprasegmental variables contributed to the perception of foreign accent, suprasegmental variables such as total and intonation patterns were the most influential factor in predicting perceived foreign accent. To conclude, PAM failed to accurately predict learning difficulties of nonnative sounds faced by L2 learners solely based on perceived phonetic distances. As Speech Learning Model (SLM) hypothesizes, production was found to be driven by perception, since equivalence classification of L2 sounds to L1 categories prevented the establishment of a new phonological category, thus further resulted in divergence in L2 production. Although production was hypothesized to eventually resemble perception, asynchrony between production and perception was observed due to different mechanisms involved.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-03T11:52:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2014-04-25Bitstream added on 2015-03-03T12:07:19Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000809431.pdf: 7440467 bytes, checksum: 7396af26c146adb564c07919d0666bc1 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O espraiamento da nasalização é observado desde a primeira gramática da língua portuguesa (FERNÃO DE OLIVEIRA, 1536) e por ortógrafos (MADUREIRA FEIJÓ, 1734; GONÇALVES VIANA, 1892). O espraiamento nasal é um processo de assimilação que ocorre quando a nasalização da consoante se estende sobre um segmento vocálico adjacente. O espraiamento da nasalização também pode ocorrer em diferentes contextos com um processo de assimilação. A presente dissertação faz uma revisão geral dos trabalhos de fonética e fonologia que fazem referência a qualquer tipo de fenômeno de espraiamento nasal. O corpus analisado acusticamente é um conjunto de palavras produzidas por um falante nativo do dialeto paulista. Através da análise acústica, estudou-se a estrutura dos formantes dos segmentos com nasalização e dos segmentos orais que podem ser nasalizadas em um processo de espraiamento nasal. Dadas as dificuldades de definição dos formantes nasais com programa Praat, foram usadas diferentes técnicas para conseguir um resultado melhor. Essa questão é discutida na presente dissertação. A dissertação contribui para uma melhor compreensão do espraiamento nasal e de como descrever formantes nasais. Ela também apresenta uma análise dos dados da língua portuguesa do Brasil, com especial referência ao dialeto paulista / Nasal spreading has been observed since the first grammar of Portuguese (FERNÃO DE OLIVEIRA, 1536) and by orthographers (MADUREIRA FEIJÓ, 1734; GONÇALVES VIANA, 1892). The nasal spreading is an assimilatory process that occurs when a consonantal nasalization spreads over an adjacent vocalic segment. Nasal spreading can also occur with a process of assimilation in different contexts. The present study and research makes a general review of phonetic and phonological works that makes reference to any kind of nasal spreading phenomenon. The corpus investigated acoustically is a set of sentences spoken by a native speaker of Paulista Dialect. The acoustic investigation studied the formant structure of the segments with nasalization and oral segments that could be nasalized in a process of nasal spreading. Given the difficulties of setting the nasal formants with Praat program, different techniques were used to achieve a better result. This question is discussed in the present dissertation. The dissertation contributes to a better understanding of nasal spreading, how to describe nasal formants, and presents an analysis of data from Brazilian Portuguese with special reference to Paulista Dialect