Academic literature on the topic 'English vowels and consonants'

Este estudio compara el efecto de dos métodos de entrenamiento de alta variabilidad fonética o ‘high variability phonetic training’ (HVPT) sobre sonidos específicamente entrenados y sobre sonidos no entrenados pero implícitamente presentados. Con este fin, se implementan diversos regímenes de entrenamiento fonético cuyo objetivo es mejorar la percepción y la producción de 5 vocales del inglés británico (/i ɪ æ ʌ ɜː/) y de las consonantes oclusivas en posición inicial y final de palabra por hablantes bilingües de catalán y castellano. Así, este estudio investiga: (a) si el entrenamiento fonético recibido puede mejorar la percepción y la producción de segmentos entrenados y no entrenados, (b) si la mejora se generaliza a nuevos estímulos y hablantes, (c) si la mejora se mantiene un tiempo después, (d) qué método de entrenamiento, identificación (ID) o discriminación categórica (DIS) es más eficaz, y (e) cuáles son las impresiones de los participantes sobre el entrenamiento fonético como una herramienta de instrucción fonética. Cien estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera fueron divididos en cuatro grupos experimentales y un grupo de control. Los grupos entrenados diferían tanto en método de entrenamiento (ID, DIS) como en el enfoque del entrenamiento (consonantes, vocales) dando lugar a cuatro grupos diferentes. Crucialmente, los cuatro grupos fueron entrenados con los mismos estímulos CVC (por ejemplo, zat, zut, zad, zud), exponiendo a los participantes a los contrastes fonéticos entrenados y a los contrastes fonéticos no entrenados. Los resultados revelan que todos los grupos experimentales superaron significativamente al grupo de control en su identificación de sonidos entrenados (vocales y consonantes oclusivas en posición inicial), mostrando la eficacia de ambas metodologías de entrenamiento fonético (ID y AX DIS). Sin embargo, mientras que ambos grupos experimentales mejoran su percepción de las oclusivas iniciales de manera similar, los aprendices de ID superan a los aprendices de DIS en la percepción de vocales específicamente entrenadas después del entrenamiento fonético. Estos resultados sugieren que la modificación de la percepción de los diferentes tipos de segmentos (vocales, consonantes) puede requerir diferentes procedimientos y duraciones de entrenamiento distintas. Curiosamente, sólo los aprendices de DIS mostraron una mejora significativa en la percepción de los sonidos no específicamente entrenados, lo que indica que este método de entrenamiento puede proporcionar mejoras en la percepción de sonidos entrenados y sonidos no entrenados pero implícitamente presentados. En cuanto a la generalización y a la retención de los efectos del entrenamiento, los resultados con sonidos vocálicos apuntan a la superioridad de la tarea de ID sobre la tarea categórica de DIS. Además, ambos métodos son adecuados para entrenar consonantes iniciales de manera similar. Con respecto a la producción, sólo los aprendices de ID entrenados en vocales fueron capaces de mejorar significativamente su producción de los sonidos vocálicos. Por último, las opiniones de los estudiantes acerca del entrenamiento fonético como una herramienta de enseñanza de L2 fueron en general positivas, e ID fue más valorado que DIS como un método de formación. Globalmente, estos resultados sugieren que ambos métodos son efectivos para entrenar la percepción de una L2. Sin embargo, los métodos pueden promover mejoras, generalización y retención de los distintos segmentos en diferentes grados. Los mejores resultados obtenidos con el método ID, en particular con las vocales, y el hecho de que sólo el método DIS proporcione la mejora de sonidos no entrenados pueden estar relacionados con la naturaleza y el fin de cada metodología y/o con las propiedades acústicas de cada segmento. Las consecuencias teóricas y prácticas de estos resultados pueden ser de utilidad para futuros trabajos de investigación y aplicaciones prácticas de aprendizaje de la pronunciación.<br>This study compares the effect of two high variability phonetic training (HVPT) methods on specifically attended sounds and on implicitly exposed but unattended sounds. Several training regimes are implemented aimed at improving the perception and production of a subset of English vowels (/i ɪ æ ʌ ɜː/) and initial and final stops by Spanish/Catalan bilingual learners of English. Thus this study addresses the following questions: (a) whether training can improve the perception and production of trained as well as untrained segments, (b) whether improvement generalizes to novel stimuli and talkers, (c) if improvement is retained over time, (d) which training method (Identification (ID) or categorical Discrimination (DIS)) is more effective, and (e) what are the participants’ impressions of phonetic training as a L2 training tool. A total of 100 bilingual Catalan/Spanish learners of English were divided into four experimental groups and a control group and were tested on their identification of English sounds presented in CVC non-words before and after a five-week training period, and two months later. L2 production was assessed before and immediately after training through a picture naming task and analysed by means of native speaker judgments. The trained groups differed either in terms of training method (ID, DIS) or focus of training (consonants, vowels), resulting in four different groups. Crucially, all four groups were trained with the same sets of CVC non-words (e.g. zat, zut, zad, zud), exposing learners to attended contrasts within trials and to unattended contrasts across trials. The results reveal that all experimental groups significantly outperform the controls in their identification of trained sounds (vowels and initial stops), showing the efficacy of both phonetic training methodologies (ID and categorical AX DIS). However, while both experimental groups perform similarly when modifying initial stop perception, the ID trainees outperform the DIS trainees on trained vowel perception. These results suggest that modifying the perception of different types of segments might require different training procedures and amounts of training time. Interestingly, only the DIS trainees show a significant improvement in the perception of untrained/unattended L2 sounds, indicating that this training method may be more suited to enhance learners’ perception of attended as well as unattended target sounds. Regarding generalization and retention, the results point to the superiority of the ID task over a categorical DIS task when training vowel sounds. Moreover, the results indicate that both methods are well suited for training initial consonants to the same extent. With respect to production, only the vowel ID trainees are able to significantly improve their production of trained sounds, which shows that pronunciation improvement might take place as a result of an identification perceptual training regime, even in the absence of production training. Finally, students’ opinions of phonetic training as an EFL tool are overall positive and ID is favoured over DIS as a training method. Globally, these findings suggest that while both methods are effective for training L2 perception, ID and DIS methods may promote improvement, generalization and retention for vowels and for consonants to different degrees. The better results obtained with ID training, particularly for vowels, and the fact that only DIS promoted improvement with untrained sounds (cross-training effects) may be related to the nature and focus of the tasks and/or to the acoustic characteristics of the target sounds. These results may have implications for future research on phonetic training and practical applications in the teaching of L2 pronunciation.

In spite of having a fixed standard of pronunciation, English is being used in various ways in parts of the world, particularly in its way of utterance. English vowel is playing one of the significant roles in making different varieties of English language. This essay tries to see into detail how some phonetic features (formant movement, frequency, pitch) of English vowels vary in relation to Bengali, Catalan, Italian, Spanish and Swedish speakers. It has been found that all these speakers vary a lot from each other in the utterance of English vowels.

Vietnamese people have many difficulties when pronouncing English. Among those, this paper will firstly deal with the hypothesis “English word-final consonants are not pronounced in a native-like way by Vietnamese speakers”. Theoretical phonological research about final consonants in the Vietnamese language and English has been carried out to characterize the difficulties. Data from Vietnamese informants were collected and analyzed, then synthesized to the most significant problems. Vietnamese effort to pronounce English word-final consonants will be towards omitting, adding schwa or replacing by sounds closer to those existing in their mother-tongue. Results of native speakers’ evaluation of Vietnamese-accented final consonants are also concluded to clarify how comprehensible informants’ pronunciation is. These findings will hopefully be useful for those who are interested in the topic and for further research.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of vowel quality in South African English (SAE) using the following data: firstly, the existing impressionistic literature on SAE and other relevant accents of English, the former of which is subject to a critical review; secondly, acoustic data from a similar range of accents, including new SAE data, collected and instrumentally analyzed specifically for the purposes of this research. These various data are used to position, on both a descriptive and theoretical level, the SAE vowel system. In addition, and in the service of providing a careful reconstruction of the linguistic history of this variety, it offers a three-stage koin´eization model which helps, in many respects, to illuminate the respective roles played by endogenous and exogenous factors in SAE’s development. More generally, the analysis is focussed on rendering explicit the extent to which the synchronic status and diachronic development of SAE more generally, and SAE vowel quality more particularly, provides support for a number of descriptive and theoretical frameworks, including those provided in Labov (1994), Torgersen and Kerswill (2004), Trudgill (2004) and Schneider (2003; 2007). With respect to these frameworks, and based on the results of the analysis, it proposes an extension to Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model, shows Trudgill’s (2004) model of new-dialect formation to be inadequate in accounting for some of the SAE data, provides evidence that SAE is a possibly imminent but ‘conservative’ member of Torgersen and Kerswill’s (2004) SECS-Shift and uses SAE data to question the applicability of the SECS-Shift to FOOT-Fronting. Furthermore, this thesis provides evidence that SAE has undergone an indexicallydriven arrestment of the Diphthong and Southern Shifts and a subsequent and related diffusion of GenSAE values at the expense of BrSAE ones. Similarly, it shows that SAE’s possible participation in the SECS-Shift constitutes an effective chain-shift reversal ‘from above’. It stresses that, in order to understand such phenomena, recourse needs to be made to a theory of indexicality that takes into account the unique sociohistorical development of SAE and its speakers. Lastly, the adoption of the three-stage koin´eization model mentioned above highlights the merits of considering both endogenous and exogenous factors in the historical reconstruction of new-dialect formation and, for research into SAE in particular, strengthens the case for further investigation into the possible effects of 19th-century Afrikaans/Dutch, Yiddish and north-of-English dialects on the formation of modern SAE.<br>Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.<br>Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-70).<br>Many recognizers use bottom-up methods for recognizing each phoneme or feature, and use the cues and the context to find the most appropriate words or sentences. But humans recognize words not just through bottom-up processing, but also top-down. In many cases of listening, one can usually predict what will come based on the preceding context, or one can determine what has been pronounced by listening to the following sounds. Therefore, if some cues to a word are given, it would be possible to refine the recognition by using the top-down method. This thesis deals with the improvement of the performance of recognition by using the top-down method. And most of the work will be concentrated on the problem of vowel recognition, when the adjacent consonants are known.<br>by Park Chi-youn.<br>S.M.

<p> Several studies across various languages have shown that monolingual listeners perceive significant differences between the speech of monolinguals and bilinguals. However, these differences may not always affect the phoneme category as identified by the listener or the speaker; differences may often be found between tokens corresponding to unique phonological categories and, as such, be more easily detectable through acoustic analysis. We hypothesized that unshared English vowels produced by young Spanish-English bilinguals would have measurably different formant values and duration than the same vowels produced by young English monolinguals because of Spanish influence on English phonology. We did not find significant differences in formant values between the two groups, but we found that SpanishEnglish bilinguals produced certain vowels with longer duration than English monolinguals. Our findings add to the ever-growing body of literature on bilingual language acquisition and the perception of accentedness.</p><p>