The Polish language has a complex sibilant structure when compared to languages like English. Of particular interest here are the alveolo-palatal and retroflex sibilants. There have been some previous studies on Polish sibilants examining production and perception of children (under 5 years). However, there is a greater need for understanding adult perception of children’s productions and the perception of different populations listening to children’s productions. Contributing to perception studies would, therefore, allow for a more in-depth analysis of this field of research. This paper builds on the findings of a production-perception study of Polish sibilants in typical children (Zygis et al., 2023) and expands the results by examining English and Heritage Polish population perceptions of Polish children’s productions. The Zygis et al. study examined Polish children and their production and perception of the contrasting sibilants. The study looked at the perception of the children for their own production and adults’ productions. Their study acquired recordings of 80 Polish children aged 35–106 months producing words with /s, ʂ, ɕ/. One of their tasks involved the child participants hearing their own productions of word-medial sibilants: /kasa/, /kaʂa/ and, /kaɕa/ at random. They then had to choose between three images (corresponding to Polish words, e.g.: kasa for cash register) to indicate the stimuli they heard. Their study found that there were a number of acoustic parameters that children used to identify sibilants. They observed that especially the younger children, “appear [to] pay more attention to formants independent of the sibilant and [that] the cue weighting [for these young children] changes during the acquisition process” (Zygis et al., 2023). For the present study, we wanted to explore the perception of these word-medial sibilants for different phonetic environments and for non-native listener populations. The three phonetic conditions included: the whole word as in the original study, the isolated sibilant, and the (isolated) sibilant together with the preceding vowel. The audio files (taken from Zygis et al, 2023) were edited and played to both native English and Polish Heritage listeners at McMaster University in Hamilton, to determine the perception of the three-way Polish sibilant distinction. This distinction is non-existent in English for English listeners or influenced by both Heritage and English phonetics/phonology for Heritage speakers. The sibilant distinction in English lies between /s/ and /ʃ/, therefore the task for the English native participants was to choose between buttons that indicated “kasa | as | s” (for the /s/ sibilant) or “kasha | ash | sh” (for /ʃ/) to indicate which sibilant they perceived. The Heritage speakers of Polish were English participants with varying levels of Polish fluency residing in the Southern Ontario area. They used the same design (three-way sibilant distinction) as the original study. A total of 41 English and 13 Heritage listeners participated in the study. It was hypothesized that the English native listeners would categorize all Polish alveolars as (English) alveolars, but it was not clear how retroflex and alveolo-palatal contrasts from the children’s complex productions would be resolved by the English listeners. It was further assumed that the perception of stimuli with vowel transitions (e.g., /kasa/ and /as/ in contrast to isolated /s/) would significantly differ comparing English listeners and Polish Heritage listeners. In our results, English participants increasingly categorized all manipulations of /s/ as /s/, and /ɕ/ as the /ʃ/ sibilant, especially for the older children’s productions. Their perceptions for the retroflex /ʂ/ was split, half as /s/ perceptions, across conditions. Phonetic information in the form of formants (on top of the spectral noise of the isolated sibilant) did not significantly improve distinction for the English participants. The Polish Heritage speakers showed difficulty in correctly identifying /ʂ/ variations especially in the older children. Phonetic environment and age had varying effects depending on the sibilant. As Polish Heritage participants are familiar with three-way sibilant contrasts, it was interesting to see how these Heritage speakers’ classification differed from that of English participants, especially for stimuli from children who are in the very initial stages of speech development (i.e., decreased articulatory and acoustic accuracy). / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Unfamiliar speech sounds are often labelled into sounds of familiar, acoustic categories. The perception of foreign speech sounds is relevant and interesting to study in Canada with its diverse linguistic pool. As fascinating it would be to study many foreign languages, the focus of our study will be on one particular language and, more specifically, one group of speech sounds. This paper explores the findings of a production-perception study on Polish sibilants (“a type of consonant sound where the tip of the tongue is brought near the roof of the mouth for the air to be pushed past to make hiss sounds (ex: s, z, sh, zh in English))”. Encyclopedia Britannica) in typical children and the perception of their productions by others. This study builds on previous work done by Zygis and colleagues (2023) that focused on Polish children's production, self-perception, and native Polish adults' perception of sibilant productions. The child participants were aged 35-106 months and produced words with the sounds /s, ʂ, ɕ/. These symbols are standardized representations of sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that correspond to speech sounds that may be present in languages. For our study, the audio recordings (from Zygis et al., 2023) were manipulated and played to native English speakers at McMaster University to determine their distinction of the three sibilant contrasts /s, ʂ, ɕ/, which do not exist in English. In English, there is a two-way distinction of the previously mentioned sibilants which is represented by the IPA symbol /s/ (as in “[s]ake”) and /ʃ/ (like in “[sh]ake”). The goal was to observe how the English participants categorized /s, ʂ, ɕ/ into either /s/ and /ʃ/. Another round of the experiment was done with native English participants with varying Polish fluency residing in the Ontario area to capture their perception of the manipulated sibilant stimuli. English participants increasingly categorized all manipulations of /s/ as /s/ and /ɕ/ as the /ʃ/ sibilant, especially with the older children. Their perceptions for the retroflex /ʂ/ was split, half as /s/ perceptions, across conditions. Phonetic information in the form of vowel information (on top of the isolated sibilant information) did not significantly improve sibilant distinction for the English participants. The Polish Heritage speakers showed difficulty in correctly identifying /ʂ/ variations, especially in the older children. Phonetic environment and age had varying effects depending on the sibilant. The findings from this study contribute to our understanding of cross-language differences in the acquisition of foreign speech sounds. Note, that acquisition here refers to learning of speech sounds, which does not mean perfection but rather the process of developing the sounds. Our findings contribute to child-produced Polish sibilants and yield further insight into the acoustic characteristics that listeners rely on in making perceptual judgments of foreign sounds.

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Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University. Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Department of Media. / Bibliography: leaves 391-427. / Preamble or redesigning Poland: 1989-2004 -- Introducing Polish cinema -- Of (post) transitional Polishness and film -- Of the Polish film industry, culture and criticism 1989-2004: a story in three acts -- Of nostalgia and arcadias in heritage films -- Of the People's Republic and its memory -- Of the transitional ethos -- Of (post) transitional comic relief -- Conclusion. / This thesis examines patterns of (post) transitional developments in Polish cinema between 1989 and 2004. It proposes a three-stage approach to the analysis of transitional continuities in films about the mythical Polish past, The Polish People's Republic (PRL), the contemporary reality and contemporary Polish comedies. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / iv, 427 leaves

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Anthropology, June 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Independent Poland ceased to exist in 1795 and the various insurrections to restore the Polish state were thwarted by the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Russians. During the First World War, Polish statesmen called upon the thousands of Polish immigrants in the United States to join the Polish Army in France, a military force funded by the French government and organized by the Polish Falcons of America and Ignacy Paderewski, the world-famous Polish pianist. Over 20,000 men trained in Canada and fought in the final months of the war on the Western front. While in France they were placed under the command of General Jozef Haller and became known as Haller’s Army. At the conclusion of the war, the Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference decided to send the soldiers to Poland to fight in the Polish-Soviet War to stop the western advance of the Bolsheviks. When the war ended, the United States government, with the influence of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, funded the return of the soldiers to their homes in the United States. This dissertation focuses on questions of the relationships among foreign policy, nationalism, and immigration and investigates forced recruitment, dissatisfaction with the cause of Polish independence exacerbated by difficult wartime conditions, nationalism among immigrant groups, ethnic identity, and anti-Semitism.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Christine M. Skwiot, Gerald H. Davis, committee co-chairs; Hugh H. Hudson, committee member. Electronic text (184 p. : ill. (some col.), col. maps) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 13, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p.175-184).

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the patterns of language alternation in the Polish community in Lithuania, which can be described as an indigenous ethnic group that has been living on the territory of modern-day Lithuania since the fourteenth century (Potašenko 2007). Following two language ideologies, Russification during Soviet times and Lithuanisation post-independence, the Lithuanian Poles developed complex linguistic repertoires, consisting of the regional and standard variety of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. One of the most significant consequences of the prolonged language contact has been the emergence of frequent and regular language alternation between the regional variety of Polish and Russian, which constitutes the focal point of the present study. As the existing research suggests, the linguistic phenomena arising as a result of language contact can be situated along a continuum, which starts with code-switching, then gradually moves towards code-mixing and finally evolves into a conventionalised fused lect (Auer 1999). 'Classic' code-switching is characterised by the locally meaningful juxtaposition of the two languages, code-mixing can be described as a type of interaction where the switched mode of speaking becomes the norm while a fused lect is an even further development of bilingual speech, which presupposes loss of variation and an increase of linguistic structure. The data for the present study come from a corpus of spontaneous conversations involving members of the Polish community. The recordings were collected in the city of Vilnius and feature 25 respondents in their twenties. The data analysis reveals that all three types of language alternation feature in the present corpus; however, code-mixing is clearly the preferred type. It immediately manifests itself in the frequent insertion of Russian single switches and larger constituents into the Polish base. As a result of its wide spread and frequency, language alternation has lost its immediate local meaning and the pattern of frequent Polish-Russian mixing has become the accepted mode of speaking within the Polish speech community.

This comprehensive account of Anglo-Polish relations, 1788-95, re-examines official and popular British perspectives on the second partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, perpetrated by Russia and Prussia in 1793, and on the third. 1795. partition of Poland at Russian. Austrian, and Prussian hands, which completed a process begun in 1772. In 1793 and 1795 prominent Poles nurtured high hopes of British interference, which they assiduously, unavailingly, courted. Those dismemberments aroused widespread and genuine British interest and sympathy, and lent themselves, to a generally unrecognized degree, to partisan politicking in Britain. As well the little known pro-Polish remonstrances and activities of some British diplomats and private individuals often served multiple interests--Poland's, and perhaps support for or opposition to war against Revolutionary France, Jacobinism, or domestic Parliamentary reform. In neither the second nor third partition, however, did Britain officially intervene, despite Poland's potential value to her as a trading partner, ally, and bulwark against Russian expansion. Having, however, underestimated the extensive consequences for Britain of the Polish upheaval--critical alliances difficult to secure and maintain, moral uproar at home. even scarcity--William Pitt the Younger's ministry and the nation endured these in the 1790s as Poland disappeared from the map. The breadth of British popular support for the Polish cause then, additionally, presaged nineteenth century British Polonophilia and Russophobia. Past Anglo-Polish relations, the intricacies of the conduct of contemporary British and Polish foreign policy and diplomacy, and of British 'public opinion' as expressed mainly in Parliament and the press are noted. The 1789 French Revolution, the 1791 Ochakov affair and evolving Anglo-Russian relations, the First Coalition's French Revolutionary War (1792-7), Britain's foreign alliances and domestic politics, and Polish internal developments, in particular the 3 May 1791 Constitution, the confederation ofTargowica, and the 1794 Kosciuszko uprising, provide the context. A wide variety of primary and secondary sources, published and unpublished, in several languages, were consulted.

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