1,720,979 research outputs found
Phonetic factors influencing /l/-rhoticisation in Greek
Get PDFThis study investigates phonetic factors – vocalic/consonantal context, duration, stress - favouring rhotic perception of the lateral approximant in Greek. Nonsense
words containing the lateral in different lengths in both intervocalic and internal
coda position, alongside similar words containing a rhotic, were presented to Greek
listeners for categorisation as /l/ or /r/. Results showed that laterals were perceived
as rhotics if they matched the rhotic in duration. Rhotics, on the other hand, were
only perceived as laterals if they were articulated as an approximant rather than as a tap
The function of olfactory experience in reasoning : An empirical study
No full textThis study reports the role of olfactory experience (i. e. smell of medication) in a
nine-year old girl’s reasoning in pair-work situation where the children were asked
to choose items useful on a desert island. The extract analysed here is part of the
larger data set of my dissertation, in which I investigate how sensory-motor activities
involved in reasoning. I video-recorded an experimental task, in which the participants
(N=27; age=9; Hungarian L1) have been asked to choose 7 items out of 14
to take those to an imaginary uninhabited island. The multimodal analysis shows
that children did not choose the vitamin pills due to its unpleasant smell. The findings
suggests that crossmodal experiences can be structural elements of reasoning.nonPeerReviewe
Academic vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes course
Get PDFAcademic vocabulary instruction can be beneficial to students in EMI universities since academic vocabulary knowledge predicts performance in academic tasks. With the aim to inform EAP materials design, this study examines the occurrence and repetition of high-frequency academic vocabulary in the printed teaching materials used in a presessional EAP course at a UK university. Findings indicate that even when EAP teachers do not design materials with the intention to include high-frequency AVL lemmas, as indicated from the interviews, they do include many. However, the average repetition rate of academic vocabulary was below 10 occurrences and, hence, unlikely to lead to incidental vocabulary learning. Implications for research and pedagogy are discussed
Posh accent and vocal attractiveness in British English
Get PDFPosh accent in British English is associated with upper class. Previous research on
poshness has been centred on vocabulary, grammar and phonology, but little is
known about the phonetic properties. This study, as part of a larger project, is an
attempt to connect posh accent with attractiveness of voice through a common set of
dimensions originating from emotional prosody research. Using VocalTractLab and
Praat, we created stimuli varying in voice quality, nasality, formant shift ratio, pitch
shift and duration. Results of two separate perception experiments showed that only
voice quality and formant shift ratio functioned significantly. Breathy voice sounded
the most posh and attractive, and pressed voice the least. Likewise, utterances with
the smallest formant shift ratio sounded the most posh and attractive
L1 Transfer, Definiteness and Specificity of De-terminers in L2 English
No full textThis study investigates L1 transfer from Cypriot Greek (CG), definiteness and speci-ficity of determiners in L2 English. 100 CG undergraduate students (ages 17-23) participated in the study. The linguistic (socio-economic) background questionnaires were used. Their written corpus (100 essays) was analysed in terms of determiner production. They were also offered an elicitation task based on Ionin et al. (2003, 2004), which was focused on elicitation of definite determiner the in [+def; +spec] and [+def; ‒spec] environments and indefinite determiner a in [‒def; +spec] and [‒def; ‒spec] environments. The results of the study showed that the most problem-atic condition for CG students was [‒def; +spec] with target indefinite determiner as they fluctuated in their written production between target and non-target settings
Prosodic focus in three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou and Ningbo
Get PDFThe present study investigated three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou, and
Ningbo. It is found that, in all three dialects, focus is encoded by increasing the
maximum F0 and duration of focused words, and lowering and compressing the F0
and pitch range of post-focus words. These results are consistent with previous
findings about Wu dialect in Shanghai. Northern Wu dialects therefore seem to
encode focus in a similar way to Beijing Mandarin, but different from many
languages/dialects spoken in southern China. This finding, together with evidence
from gene studies and migration history of Wu areas, provide further support for the
inheritance hypothesis of PFC, according to which all languages with PFC are
descendants of a common proto-language in the Middle East
Frequency information and reduction in second-language perception of multi-word sequences
No full textEntrenchment of multi-word sequences is known to shape native language competence, but there is debate about how (much) it affects L2 speakers. We investigate advanced English learners’ receptive processing of multi-word sequences with a word-monitoring experiment. The effect of reduction on recognition of the word to was tested in English V-to-Vinf constructions of varying surface frequencies and transitional probabilities. Results show that high frequency facilitates recognition of both full and reduced forms. Unlike with native speakers, there is no chunking effect of high-frequency reduced forms, and no facilitating effect of transitional probability. The findings suggest that advanced L2 learners draw on basic frequency information, but do not make use of the full range of probabilistic cues available to native speakers
Rich Reduction:Sound-segment residuals and the encoding of communicative functions along the hypo-hyper scale
Get PDFManaging and, ideally, explaining phonetic variation has ever since been a key issue in the speech sciences. In this context, the major contribution of Lindblom's H&H theory was to replace the futile search for invariance by an explainable variance based on the tug-of-war metaphor. Recent empirical evidence on articulatory prosodies and the involvement of reduction in conveying communication functions both suggest the next steps along the line of argument opened up by Lindblom. Specifically, we need to supplement Lindblom's explanatory framework and revise the speaker-listener conflict that lies at the heart of the tug-of-war metaphor. The author's suggestion would be to "offshore" the tug-of-war metaphor and replace it by the ocean metaphor of Bolinger (1964), with the ups and downs at the surface of the ocean representing the speaker's variation along the hypo-hyper scale and wavelength corresponding to the time domain of the reduction variation
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