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.

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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.

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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.