This study investigates upper lip protrusion during selected French utterances as produced by six native French speakers. A photocell, incorporated into a headpiece, was used to transduce upper lip movement into an electrical signal which was then amplified and displayed on a graphic recorder. Utterances included a) VCV utterances; b) utterances containing the consonant clusters /rstr/, /rskr/, /kstr/ and /strstr/; c) utterances containing the segments /i/ and /u/ in sequence or separated, in various combinations, by a consonant and/or word boundary; d) utterances produced with an increasing degree of emphatic stress; and e) utterances produced at an increasing rate. Three aspects of the protrusion gesture are examined: extent of protrusion, velocity, transition time, and the relations between them. Results indicate differences between these three measures for the production of /u/ as compared to /y/, as well as differences when upper lip movement is directed away from target protrusion position as compared to when it is directed toward target protrusion position. Results also indicate how the three measures are affected by the following: insertion of a consonant and/or word boundary between /i/ and /u/ in the /i/-/u/ utterances; increase in level of stress on the syllable containing the rounded vowel /u/; and increase in rate of speaking. This study also includes an attempt to determine onset of protrusion in a consonant cluster followed by a rounded vowel. It is hypothesized that the extent of coarticulation of upper lip protrusion might provide some useful information concerning a discrete unit in terms of which speech may be produced at the articulatory level. Results show that such a unit may be composed of either a VCC...V or CC...V group. The possibility of coarticulation of upper lip protrusion being language-dependent as well as the possibility of coarticulation patterns differing for the upper and lower lip is discussed. Results are also related to various models of speech production although they do not appear to strongly support any one model. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

No description available.

Language learning strategies have become an important element of second language acquisition research over the course of the last few decades. Much research on these strategies has been dedicated to speaking, reading, and other language skill sets. However, one essential skill needed for communication is pronunciation. No matter how proficient other areas of linguistic ability may be, it can be difficult to interact effectively with native speakers if one's pronunciation is poor. Yet research dedicated to pronunciation and language learning strategies is in surprisingly short supply. Of those studies that have researched pronunciation strategies, some have been dedicated to discovering new pronunciation strategies (Derwing & Rossiter, 2002; Osburne, 2003; and Vitanova & Miller, 2002), while others (Peterson, 2000) categorized pronunciation strategies using a well known strategy inventory. However, there is one study that has gone in a different direction concerning pronunciation strategies. Rather than categorize pronunciation strategies using a strategy taxonomy like Oxford (1990), Eckstein (2007) categorized pronunciation strategies using Kolb's (1984) Experiential Learning Cycle model and found significant effects between pronunciation accuracy and use of pronunciation strategies mapped using Eckstein's (2007) Pronunciation Acquisition Construct (PAC).The present study tested the PAC by teaching pronunciation strategies to L2 Japanese learners. The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of pronunciation strategy usage categorized using the PAC upon pronunciation gains and to examine learner differences based upon pronunciation gains and strategy usage. In doing so, significant gains were found in contextualized pronunciation. Additionally, subjects who more frequently used the strategy "think of benefits to be gained by improving pronunciation", a motivation strategy, were found to show higher levels of pronunciation gain in a non-contextualized pronunciation environment.

This study investigates Swedish upper-secondary teachers’ views and reported practices regarding pronunciation instruction in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. It adopts a mixed-method design, analysing qualitative data collected from a focus-group interview (N=4) and quantitative data collected from an online survey (N=54).  To investigate the views and reported practices of teachers, the following research questions were posed:  1. What are the views and attitudes of English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school regarding pronunciation and pronunciation instruction?  2. How do English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school describe their own practices in pronunciation instruction?  Results indicate that teachers generally value comprehensibility as the most important aim of pronunciation instruction. However, a native-like accent still seems to be highly valued, and nativeness norms still seem to affect teachers’ views and practices to some extent. Finally, our findings indicate that teachers spend very little time on pronunciation teaching in general, and they highlight that other aspects of language instruction are more important.

In the last thirty years, language learning strategies have been used in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) to help learners autonomously improve their English listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, language learning strategies have not been applied to pronunciation learning in a large scale manner. This study attempted to bridge this gap by investigating the usage of pronunciation learning strategies among adult ESL learners. A strategic pronunciation learning scale (SPLS) was administered to 183 adult ESL learners in an Intensive English Program. Their scores on the SPLS were compared with their scores of spontaneous pronunciation on a program-end speaking assignment. A stepwise regression analysis showed that frequently noticing other's English mistakes, asking for pronunciation help, and adjusting facial muscles all correlated significantly with higher spontaneous pronunciation skill. Other analyses suggested that strong pronunciation learners used pronunciation learning strategies more frequently than poorer learners. Finally, a taxonomy is proposed that categorizes pronunciation learning strategies into pedagogically-founded groups based on Kolb's (1984) learning construct and four stages of pronunciation acquisition: input/practice, noticing/feedback, hypothesis forming, and hypothesis testing. This taxonomy connects language learning strategies to pronunciation acquisition research.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

Music education and pronunciation teaching within second language education would seem to be two entirely separate fields. Yet, there are undeniable links between learning to play an instrument, such as the violin, and learning to speak in a second language. This Report attempts to bridge the divide between both disciplines by highlighting the similarities between musical features and pronunciation features, and by applying principles for practicing music to pronunciation practice. It is hoped that this comparison will motivate second language learners to practice pronunciation and increase the quality of their home practice, which has been found to play an important role in determining the degree of students’ pronunciation improvement (Sardegna, 2011). This Report begins with a review of pronunciation teaching trends and how they have shaped pronunciation teaching today. It then provides an overview of three important pronunciation learning models, followed by a discussion of a principled approach to teaching pronunciation. This principled approach may help bridge the gap between theory and classroom practice. Then, grounded on evidence suggesting strong links between teaching pronunciation and teaching violin, the Report concludes with a rationale for applying the proposed principles to a musical teaching context and suggests adopting a musical approach to practice in order to effect change in students’ English pronunciation. / text

Spoken term detection (STD) is a fundamental task for multimedia information retrieval. A major challenge faced by an STD system is the serious performance reduction when detecting out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms. The difficulties arise not only from the absence of pronunciations for such terms in the system dictionaries, but from intrinsic uncertainty in pronunciations, significant diversity in term properties and a high degree of weakness in acoustic and language modelling. To tackle the OOV issue, we first applied the joint-multigram model to predict pronunciations for OOV terms in a stochastic way. Based on this, we propose a stochastic pronunciation model that considers all possible pronunciations for OOV terms so that the high pronunciation uncertainty is compensated for. Furthermore, to deal with the diversity in term properties, we propose a termdependent discriminative decision strategy, which employs discriminative models to integrate multiple informative factors and confidence measures into a classification probability, which gives rise to minimum decision cost. In addition, to address the weakness in acoustic and language modelling, we propose a direct posterior confidence measure which replaces the generative models with a discriminative model, such as a multi-layer perceptron (MLP), to obtain a robust confidence for OOV term detection. With these novel techniques, the STD performance on OOV terms was improved substantially and significantly in our experiments set on meeting speech data.

兒化是普通話以及眾多漢語方言中普遍存在的現象，兒化音變產生的一系列韻母叫做兒化韻。迄今為止，學界對於兒化韻的研究主要集中在普通話上，而且對其性質等問題仍存在分歧。兒化韻具有不同的語音形式，本文以捲舌元音兒化韻為研究對象，以北京、鄭州、青島、平遙四個方言點為例，運用田野調查、實驗語音學和方言比較的方法，描寫各個點的音系並分析其兒化韻的聲學特徵。文章論證了漢語中存在兩種類型的捲舌兒化韻：以單個捲舌元音構成的單純型及以捲舌元音為韻尾的複合型；二者在不同的方言中，又有不同的分布；在此基礎上，我們提出應設立漢語捲舌元音系統並考慮到單純型、複合型兒化韻的區別與對立。這不僅解決了對兒化韻性質認識上的分歧，而且豐富並完善了捲舌元音的類型，對於漢語兒化韻的發音學和音系學研究都具有實質性的價值。 / 全文共分七章。第一章是引言，對漢語兒化的研究情況作一簡單述評，敘述文章的研究目的及意義，介紹研究範圍及方法並說明語料來源和標音符號的使用。第二章至第六章是文章的主體部分，分別對北京、鄭州、青島、平遙的音系及兒化韻進行分析描寫，將所有單純型兒化韻綜合比較，說明它們之間的差異，並通過單純、複合型兒化韻在方言中的對立來確立捲舌元音在語音系統中的地位。第七章是結語，總結文章的主要內容和觀點，簡論文章的局限並展望今後的研究方向。 / Erisation (ér-huà) is a common phenomenon in Mandarin and numerous Chinese dialects. Thus far, scholars have not reached an agreement on the nature of erized finals. Erized finals have several phonetic forms and this paper aims to examine the nature of one of them, rhotacized finals. This paper approaches the issue from a new perspective through the case study of four dialects, which are Beijing, Zhengzhou, Qingdao, and Pingyao. We analyze the phonological system and the acoustic characteristics of their rhotacized finals, by combining methods of field survey, experimental phonetics and dialectal comparison. It is discovered that rhotacized finals in different dialects exactly have two major categories, the “simple type and the “complex type, which are crucially distinctive in some dialects like Pingyao. According to the above analysis, we conclude that the difference in phonetic realization of rhotacized articulation, which leads to the dichotomy of rhotic monophthongs and rhotic codas of diphthongs, is critical to our understanding of Chinese rhotacized finals. It is suggested that a complete set of rhotacized vowels should be built up in one phonological system, considering the contrast between the “simple type and the “complex type. According to the “simple type rhotacized finals in these four dialects, we can draw up a system of rhotacized vowels in Chinese. Therefore, the research perfects the type of rhotacized vowels and makes innovative contribution to the study of phonetics and phonology of Erisation in Chinese. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / 紀軍娜. / "2012年11月". / "2012 nian 11 yue". / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-111). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Ji Junnuo. / Chapter 第一章 --- 引言 --- p.1 / Chapter 第一節 --- 漢語兒化韻研究概況 --- p.1 / Chapter 第二節 --- 本文研究目的及意義 --- p.6 / Chapter 第三節 --- 研究範圍及方法 --- p.7 / Chapter 第四節 --- 語料來源及標音符號 --- p.11 / Chapter 第二章 --- 北京方言的兒化韻研究 --- p.12 / Chapter 第一節 --- 北京方言概況 --- p.12 / Chapter 第二節 --- 北京方言的聲韻調系統 --- p.13 / Chapter 第三節 --- 北京方言的兒化韻及其音值分析 --- p.15 / Chapter 第四節 --- 小結 --- p.29 / Chapter 第三章 --- 鄭州方言的兒化韻研究 --- p.30 / Chapter 第一節 --- 鄭州及其方言概況 --- p.30 / Chapter 第二節 --- 鄭州方言的聲韻調系統 --- p.31 / Chapter 第三節 --- 鄭州方言的兒化韻及其音值分析 --- p.37 / Chapter 第四節 --- 《鄭州話音檔》中兒化韻的聲學分析 --- p.49 / Chapter 第五節 --- 小結 --- p.53 / Chapter 第四章 --- 青島方言的兒化韻研究 --- p.54 / Chapter 第一節 --- 青島及其方言概況 --- p.54 / Chapter 第二節 --- 青島方言的聲韻調系統 --- p.54 / Chapter 第三節 --- 青島方言的兒化韻及其音值分析 --- p.56 / Chapter 第四節 --- 小結 --- p.75 / Chapter 第五章 --- 平遙方言的兒化韻研究 --- p.76 / Chapter 第一節 --- 平遙及其方言概況 --- p.76 / Chapter 第二節 --- 平遙方言的聲韻調系統 --- p.76 / Chapter 第三節 --- 平遙方言的兒化韻及其音值分析 --- p.79 / Chapter 第四節 --- 小結 --- p.92 / Chapter 第六章 --- 漢語方言捲舌元音的系統 --- p.92 / Chapter 第一節 --- 兒化韻的語音及音系分析 --- p.93 / Chapter 第二節 --- 兒化韻的重新定義 --- p.94 / Chapter 第三節 --- 捲舌元音的定位 --- p.95 / Chapter 第七章 --- 結語 --- p.98 / Chapter 附錄一： --- 發音人情況一覽表 --- p.102 / Chapter 附錄二： --- 兒化前後對比詞表 --- p.103 / Chapter 附錄三： --- 兒化韻分合表 --- p.104 / Chapter 附錄四： --- 常用字詞兒化韻詞表 --- p.105 / 主要參考文獻 --- p.106