This study examined how native Japanese speakers, who were naïve to Mandarin, categorized Mandarin tones (in citation form) into their native pitch–accent categories. Results showed that Japanese listeners categorized the nonnative Mandarin tones into their native pitch accent categories, in ways that were consistent with the phonetic features of listeners’ native language. The findings support...

The paper evaluates Chinese EFL (English Foreign Language) learners’ attitudinal responses toward Chinese accent. Questionnaires administered among 81 intermediate proficiency EFL learners who were from China and UK (70 of whom were university students, 11 of whom were university English teachers). Results show clearly that the respondents do not have significant negative attitude towards their...

While the influence of L1 on the perception of segments is well established, the effect of L1 on the perception of suprasegmentals such as intonational contours is less known. Previous studies claim that suprasegmental processing is less sensitive to L1 experience because it is based mostly on general auditory mechanisms. Thus, falls and rises can be universally distinguished regardless of lang...

This paper looks at William Holder's "Elements of Speech" [1] from the perspective of modern phonetic and phonological literature. The structure of this presentation, first touching on general linguistic concepts, follows the three principal stages of speech production: respiration/air stream mechanism, phonation, and articulation. Holder's rendition of speech perception is discussed in conjunc...

Automatic speech segmentation is an essential tool for building large corpora for training continuous speech recognition systems. Manual segmentation of speech is both time consuming and an error-prone task. Several automatic segmentation systems have been proposed based on the acoustical features of the speech 5] 11]. In this paper, we present a novel technique for automatic seg-mentation of A...

Words can be distinguished by segmental differences or by suprasegmental differences or both. Studies from English suggest that suprasegmentals play little role in human spoken-word recognition; English stress, however, is nearly always unambiguously coded in segmental structure (vowel quality); this relationship is less close in Dutch. The present study directly compared the effects of segment...

Prosodic Prominence and prosodic boundaries have been shown to effect syllabic durations. However another factor, redundancy, also appears to have a major impact. More common words and words you can easily predict from context (more redundant) tend to be articulated less clearly and so also have a tendency to have shortened syllabic durations. This paper explores the relationship between measur...

This study reports on a mixed-methods research project into self- and peer-formative assessment of student-generated podcasts in group 18 undergraduate students. The aim was to determine whether there were any gains the spoken comprehensibility participants while having them reflect adjust their use suprasegmentals (thought groups, sentence stress, intonation). Data gathered from student logs, ...