We examined the role of stimulus variability in learning non-native phonetic contrasts (suprasegmentals) for word identification by adults, considering whether all learners benefit from high-variability training. Forty-seven English-speakers were trained to use Mandarin lexical tones to identify 18 English pseudowords with stimuli produced by either four talkers (multitalker training) or only o...

The precise nature of the interaction between acoustic and visual information in the perception of prosodic information is a question that still remains unclear. Though the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) has been shown to explain the recognition of segmental information, this model also needs to be tested in the field of suprasegmentals such as facial gestures. The first goal of this ...

Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for how much use a language makes of a contrast, i.e. the functional load (FL) of the contrast. We generalize previous work in linguistics and speech recognitio...

This research aimed 1) to compare the results of scansion with those of an acoustic analysis, 2) to classify the problematic feet of cadence, which is identical to the foot types in casual speech, and 3) to clarify the relation of scansion to acoustic analyses. Additionally, it tried to establish the necessity and clarify what benefits of acoustic analyses will provide readers of poems with pro...

This study aims to help Korean English learners learn pronunciation by revealing which suprasegmentals affect the implementation of sentences closer native speakers when they read sentences. To this end, middle school were selected as subjects and research data gathered through sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative), well syllables. Speech rate, pause frequency, du...

Within spontaneous speech there are wide variations in the articulation of the same word by the same speaker. Some words become extremely reduced while others seem to stand out more strongly in a phrase or sentence. This thesis explores these variations in articulation from two different but, arguably, related perspectives, prosodic structure and redundancy. I argue that the constraint of produ...

The usefulness of teaching pronunciation in language instruction remains controversial. Though past research suggests that teachers can make little or no difference in improving their students’ pronunciation,  current  findings  suggest  that  second  language  pronunciation  can  improve  to  be near  native-like  with  the  implementation  of  certain  criteria  such  as  the  utilization  of...

Languages convey information using several methods, and rely to different extents on different methods. The amount of reliance of a language on a method is termed the ’functional load’ of the method in the language. The term goes back to early Prague School days (Mathesius, 1929; Jakobson, 1931; Trubetzkoy, 1939), though then it was usually taken to refer only to the importance of phonemic cont...

This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect on-line speech comprehension in British speakers of English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /ə/, Dutch speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by suprasegmentals (duration and intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners heard s...

Previous work has shown a relationship between syllabic duration, redundancy within speech, and prosodic structure [1]. In addition, a spectral care of articulation measure of vowels in spontaneous speech has supported these duration results and suggest that care of articulation varies inversely with redundancy and conversely with prosodic prominence. However, these spectral measures remain inc...