Search Results (15)

Acquiring prosodic focus marking in a second language (L2) is difficult for learners whose native language utilizes strategies that differ from those of the target language. German typically uses pitch accents (L+H*/H*) to mark focus, while (Modern Standard) Arabic preferably employs a syntactic strategy (word order) or lexical means. In Syrian Arabic, a variety which is predominantly oral, pitch accents are used to mark focus, but the distribution and types are different from German. The present study investigates how Syrian Arabic learners of German prosodically mark focus in L2 German. A question–answer paradigm was used to elicit German subject-verb-object (SVO)-sentences with broad, narrow, or contrastive focus. Productions of advanced (C1, N = 17) and intermediate (B1/B2, N = 8) Syrian Arabic learners were compared to those of German controls (N = 12). Like the controls, both learner groups successfully placed pitch accents on focused constituents. However, learners, especially those with lower proficiency, used more pitch accents in non-focal regions than the controls, revealing challenges in de-accentuation. These may result from the larger number of phrase boundaries in learners’ productions, which in turn might be explained by transfer from the L1 or aspects of general fluency. Learners also differed from the controls with respect to accent type. They predominantly used H* for narrow or contrastive focus (instead of L+H*); proficiency effects played only a minor role here. Our study hence reveals an intricate interplay between cross-linguistic influence and proficiency in the L2 acquisition of prosodic focus marking, targeting a language pair so far underrepresented in the literature (German vs. Syrian Arabic). Full article

This study explores the application of transformer-based language models for automated Topic Classification in qualitative datasets from interviews conducted in Modern Greek. The interviews captured the views of parents, teachers, and school directors regarding Emergency Remote Teaching. Identifying key themes in this kind of interview is crucial for informed decision-making in educational policies. Each dataset was segmented into sentences and labeled with one out of four topics. The dataset was imbalanced, presenting additional complexity for the classification task. The GreekBERT model was fine-tuned for Topic Classification, with preprocessing including accent stripping, lowercasing, and tokenization. The findings revealed GreekBERT’s effectiveness in achieving balanced performance across all themes, outperforming conventional machine learning models. The highest evaluation metric achieved was a macro-F1-score of 0.76, averaged across all classes, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This study contributes the following: (i) datasets capturing diverse educational community perspectives in Modern Greek, (ii) a comparative evaluation of conventional ML models versus transformer-based models, (iii) an investigation of how domain-specific language enhances the performance and accuracy of Topic Classification models, showcasing their effectiveness in specialized datasets and the benefits of fine-tuned GreekBERT for such tasks, and (iv) capturing the complexities of ERT through an empirical investigation of the relationships between extracted topics and relevant variables. These contributions offer reliable, scalable solutions for policymakers, enabling data-driven educational policies to address challenges in remote learning and enhance decision-making based on comprehensive qualitative evidence. Full article

Background/Objectives: Speaker race and the listener’s language experience (i.e., monolinguals vs. bilinguals) have both been shown to influence accent intelligibility independently. Speaker race specifically is thought to be informed by learned experiences (exemplar model) or individual biases and attitudes (bias-based model). The current study investigates speaker race and the listener’s language experience simultaneously as well as listeners’ attitudes toward non-native speakers and their ability to identify the accent. Methods: Overall, 140 White English monolinguals and 140 English/Norwegian bilinguals transcribed 60 Mandarin-accented English sentences presented in noise in the context of a White or East Asian face. Following sentence transcription, participants were asked to rate the strength of the accent heard and completed a short questionnaire that assessed their accent identification ability and their language usage, proficiency, familiarity, and attitudes. Results: Results show that a listeners’ ability to identify an accent and their attitudes toward non-native speakers had a significant impact on accent intelligibility and accentedness ratings. Speaker race by itself did not play a role in accent intelligibility and accentedness ratings; however, we found evidence that speaker race interacted with participants’ accent identification scores and attitudes toward non-native speakers, and these interactions differed as a function of language experience. Conclusions: Our results suggest that bilinguals’ sociolinguistic processing may be more in line with a bias-based model than monolinguals. Full article

This study investigates how the unique circumstances of heritage language acquisition impact prosody, an understudied aspect of heritage speech. I examine the perception and production of lexical pitch accent by two generations of heritage Lithuanian speakers in Chicago (n = 13), with a qualitative comparison to one normative native speaker also living in Chicago. The speakers participated in the following: (1) a perception task requiring them to identify meaning distinctions between pairs of words that differ only by accent; and (2) a production task in which they produced sentences containing nine nominal declensions, where pitch accent plays a morphological role. In task (1), speakers across the board were not able to identify meaning distinctions in accent-based minimal pairs, irrespective of their frequency, and were more accurate at perceiving pairs that differed on the basis of segmental phonological features. However, HSs with more education perceived more accent-based distinctions, as did HSs who were more engaged in the Chicago community. Older HSs maintained more distinctions than either the NS or the younger HSs, which suggests a change in progress in the language or the Chicago Lithuanian community. In task (2), none of the speakers consistently used pitch to signal word-level prominence. Instead, all speakers relied on changes in duration and vowel quality to signal word-level prominence, suggesting that, for these speakers, there has been a shift to a stress-accent system. The older HSs also patterned more like the NS in their retention of the expected stress in the nominal declensions. Dialect was also determined to play a role in the retention of standard accent patterns in both perception and production. Full article

This paper is devoted to the features of sentence prosody (intonation) in Brazilian Portuguese spoken by immigrants whose first language is Russian, and explores the consequences that L1–L2 influence in intonation may have for communication. The study addressed four research questions: (1) Do Brazilian Portuguese L2 speakers with Russian L1 always succeed in producing the correct utterance type? (2) Can L1–L2 influence lead to misunderstanding of connotations? (3) Is it possible that sometimes L1–L2 influence leads to being perceived as too emotional or not emotional enough? (4) Can L1–L2 influence in intonation be a significant factor in the perception of accent? In a perceptual experiment, productions of four target utterances in Brazilian Portuguese by Russian L1 and Brazilian Portuguese L1 speakers were evaluated by 124 Brazilian listeners in terms of sentence type, possible connotations, accent and arousal. The target utterances included three questions of different types and an exclamation. The findings revealed that the speaker’s L1 influenced the perception of prosodic meanings by Brazilian listeners. In some cases, interference from Russian melodic contours caused the incorrect identification of the sentence type in Brazilian Portuguese. However, even when sentence type was perceived correctly, differences could be found regarding the perception of arousal or accent. Full article

This paper applies the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices (Sp_ToBI) annotation conventions to compare the intonational contours of declarative sentences in two varieties of Puerto Rican Spanish: (1) San Juan Spanish, spoken in the capital city of San Juan, and (2) Loíza Spanish, an Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken in Loíza. The geographical proximity between these two municipalities entails constant contact within a shared linguistic space. However, speakers from San Juan perceive Loíza as a municipality that has its own peculiar way of speaking. The acoustic and phonological analysis was carried out with PRAAT to verify whether pitch accents coincide in the spontaneous speech of the two analyzed varieties. The data we examined contain an overall predominance of the bitonal pitch accents L*+H and L+<H* in San Juan Spanish, and L+H* in Loíza Spanish. Findings show both similarities and differences within the two speech communities, as well as with intonational patterns in other (Afro-)Hispanic varieties. These results provide new information on spontaneous declarative intonation in (Afro-)Puerto Rican Spanish by offering a new perspective on the origin of a set of the prosodic phenomena found in these two varieties. Full article

The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented word fragment (e.g., AR- in the word archive) was presented at the end of a carrier sentence for identification. The results of the experiment revealed differences in the cue weighting of English lexical stress perception between native and non-native listeners. For native English listeners, vowel quality was a more prominent cue than f0, while native Mandarin Chinese listeners employed both vowel quality and f0 in a comparable fashion. These results suggested that (a) vowel reduction is superior to f0 in signaling initial stress in the words and (b) f0 facilitates the recognition of word initial stress, which is modulated by first language. Full article

The present study explores intonational patterns in spontaneous speech in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS). The data came from 12 monolingual Spanish speakers in the city of Pucallpa, where the Spanish language has historically been in contact with the Amazonian language Shipibo-Konibo. The speakers responded to an open-ended prompt that elicited broad focus declaratives. Acoustic information from 1524 pitch accents was extracted from 194 sentences and analyzed using Praat. The analysis focused on five features: F0 rises, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering, and cases of stress clash. The results not only supported previous research on this variety that came from read speech tasks (e.g., F0 peaks consistently aligned with the stressed syllable), but also highlighted the importance of using multiple methodologies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of PAS prosody. Specifically, the varied sentence lengths and structures common in spontaneous speech provided new insights into downstepping, final lowering, and stress clash in PAS intonation. Overall, these results contribute to the growing literature on Spanish prosody in shared linguistic spaces and lend support for trends (such as F0 peak alignment) that have been reported in other language contact varieties. Full article

This paper presents an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in Galician Spanish (GS), a variety spoken in Northwestern Spain. Research so far has focused on explaining GS intonation features as transfer phenomena from Galician, the vernacular Romance language in the region. Because of this, previous studies have often included Galician L1 speakers, for whom transfer is expected when speaking Spanish L2. However, GS is the single L1 of half the children in Galicia, and it is spoken almost exclusively by about a quarter of Galicians. Our study focuses on this population and investigates the relative frequency and distribution of tonal units in GS when direct transfer from Galician is unlikely. A corpus of 1706 sentences (statements, questions, imperatives, and vocatives in neutral and biased contexts) was obtained from 28 participants through a discourse completion task. Results showed that patterns previously attributed to direct transfer from Galician L1 (for example, upstepped final accents in neutral declaratives or falling contours in unmarked interrogatives) are widespread in GS as L1. Findings also show commonalities with other L1 Spanish varieties, both in Europe (for example, L* L% as the unmarked declarative ending) and America (for example, the L* + H prenuclear accent of Caribbean varieties). Full article

This explorative study examines intonation contours in neutral and non-neutral statements of Paraguayan Spanish, a variety shaped by extensive contact with Guarani, a co-official language of Paraguay. Paraguayan Spanish displays both lexical and syntactic borrowings from Guarani, along with innovative intonation patterns not found in other Spanish varieties. Previous but still limited research on yes/no and wh-questions in this variety suggests the emergence of a unique intonational system, possibly of a hybrid nature, in both Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Guarani bilinguals. To date, no comprehensive description of intonation patterns in Paraguayan Spanish statements exists. The present study addresses this gap by analyzing data obtained through a Discourse Completion Task, covering broad-focus statements, contrastive focus, exclamatives, and statements of the obvious. Data were collected in 2014 from two monolingual speakers, eleven bilingual Spanish-dominant speakers, and eight bilingual Guarani-dominant speakers. The intonation is formalized using the Autosegmental–Metrical model of intonational phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices labeling system. The findings reveal three main realizations of nuclear accents (L+H*, H+L*, and innovative >H+L*) in neutral and non-neutral declarative sentences, lengthening of syllables, diverse syntactical strategies, and lexical borrowings. The study contributes to the understanding of a lesser-studied Spanish variety and offers insights into theoretical aspects of contact linguistics. Full article

This study examined whether visual speech provides speech-rhythm information that perceivers can use in speech perception. This was tested by using speech that naturally varied in the familiarity of its rhythm. Thirty Australian English L1 listeners performed a speech perception in noise task with English sentences produced by three speakers: an English L1 speaker (familiar rhythm); an experienced English L2 speaker who had a weak foreign accent (familiar rhythm), and an inexperienced English L2 speaker who had a strong foreign accent (unfamiliar speech rhythm). The spoken sentences were presented in three conditions: Audio-Only (AO), Audio-Visual with mouth covered (AVm), and Audio-Visual (AV). Speech was best recognized in the AV condition regardless of the degree of foreign accent. However, speech recognition in AVm was better than AO for the speech with no foreign accent and with a weak accent, but not for the speech with a strong accent. A follow-up experiment was conducted that only used the speech with a strong foreign accent, under more audible conditions. The results also showed no difference between the AVm and AO conditions, indicating the null effect was not due to a floor effect. We propose that speech rhythm is conveyed by the motion of the jaw opening and closing, and perceivers use this information to better perceive speech in noise. Full article

The convolution module in Conformer is capable of providing translationally invariant convolution in time and space. This is often used in Mandarin recognition tasks to address the diversity of speech signals by treating the time-frequency maps of speech signals as images. However, convolutional networks are more effective in local feature modeling, while dialect recognition tasks require the extraction of a long sequence of contextual information features; therefore, the SE-Conformer-TCN is proposed in this paper. By embedding the squeeze-excitation block into the Conformer, the interdependence between the features of channels can be explicitly modeled to enhance the model’s ability to select interrelated channels, thus increasing the weight of effective speech spectrogram features and decreasing the weight of ineffective or less effective feature maps. The multi-head self-attention and temporal convolutional network is built in parallel, in which the dilated causal convolutions module can cover the input time series by increasing the expansion factor and convolutional kernel to capture the location information implied between the sequences and enhance the model’s access to location information. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that the proposed model has a higher performance for the recognition of Mandarin with an accent, and the sentence error rate is reduced by 2.1% compared to the Conformer, with only 4.9% character error rate. Full article

Children with and without communication disorders have difficulty understanding words and sentences produced by talkers with unfamiliar characteristics, such as unfamiliar accents. To date, few studies have investigated how this difficulty manifests in linguistically diverse children. Studies of monolingual children have found that lexical and phonological skills predict accurate perception. For linguistically diverse children, there are differences in the structure of their linguistic input relative to their monolingual peers. These differences in their linguistic input influence their lexical and phonological development, suggesting that they may also differ in how they perceive unfamiliar accented speech. In this paper we present different hypotheses for how input variability might affect unfamiliar accented speech perception. Then, we conduct a focused review of the literature on how input variability affects early linguistic development for bilingual and bidialectal children. We link this information to the literature on how children with and without language disorders understand unfamiliar accented speech to identify important areas for future inquiry. Determining how input variability interacts with linguistic skills to predict unfamiliar speech perception is a crucial area for future inquiry. Effective clinical recommendations and educational accommodations require understanding of the linguistic skills and experience that support accurate variable speech perception for diverse populations. Full article

We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is prosodic. To determine the degree of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and whether CLI is more prevalent in tasks that require access to contextual information, bilinguals and controls performed three perception and two production tasks, with varying degrees of context. Results showed that bilinguals did not differ from controls in their perception of low-pass filtered utterances but diverged in contextualized tasks. In production, bilinguals, as opposed to controls, displayed a reduced use of pitch in the first pitch accent. In a discourse-completion task, they also diverged from controls in the number of non-target-like realizations, particularly in declarative question contexts. These findings demonstrate patterns of prosodic and morphosyntactic CLI and highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information in prosodic studies. Moreover, we show that the absence of tonal variations can be transferred in a stable language contact situation. Finally, the results indicate that comprehension may be hindered for this group of bilinguals when sentence type is not redundantly marked. Full article

Dysprosody is a hallmark of dysarthria, which can affect the intelligibility and naturalness of speech. This includes sentence accent, which helps to draw listeners’ attention to important information in the message. Although some studies have investigated this feature, we currently lack properly validated automated procedures that can distinguish between subtle performance differences observed across speakers with dysarthria. This study aims for cross-population validation of a set of acoustic features that have previously been shown to correlate with sentence accent. In addition, the impact of dysarthria severity levels on sentence accent production is investigated. Two groups of adults were analysed (Dutch and English speakers). Fifty-eight participants with dysarthria and 30 healthy control participants (HCP) produced sentences with varying accent positions. All speech samples were evaluated perceptually and analysed acoustically with an algorithm that extracts ten meaningful prosodic features and allows a classification between accented and unaccented syllables based on a linear combination of these parameters. The data were statistically analysed using discriminant analysis. Within the Dutch and English dysarthric population, the algorithm correctly identified 82.8 and 91.9% of the accented target syllables, respectively, indicating that the capacity to discriminate between accented and unaccented syllables in a sentence is consistent with perceptual impressions. Moreover, different strategies for accent production across dysarthria severity levels could be demonstrated, which is an important step toward a better understanding of the nature of the deficit and the automatic classification of dysarthria severity using prosodic features. Full article