The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direct
The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direct.
This study addresses the fragmentation of existing attempts at identifying the correlates of lexical stress in Czech. Its objective is therefore to thoroughly examine all commonly used correlates of prominence from the melodic, dynamic and temporal domain, as well as those of vowel quality, in three speaking styles. To evaluate various factors, we applied linear mixed effects models (LME). The results show that the stressed syllable in Czech does not manifest prominence in any of the examined domains – it is not higher, stronger, or longer. In comparison with previous studies, the analyses indicate only a weak tendency toward post-stress melodic rise. It is clear that as a language with fixed stress which does not serve a contrastive function, Czech does not require distinctive prominence marking. One interesting result of the study is the documented lengthening of word-final vowels, even within prosodic phrases, which may contribute to discontinuities between adjacent stress groups and which also has repercussions for the naturalness of speech synthesis.
The article presents the results of a study on the perception of word stress in adults who use Polish as their mother tongue. The linguistic material used in the perception tasks was three-syllable words and logatoms. Acoustic correlates of stress were primarily an increase in the value of the fundamental frequency and intensity of the stressed vowel. The results show that the subjects had no difficulty in differentiating the place of the stress in the presented stimuli, whereas they performed worse in tasks of determining the place of the st
PL
W artykule zostały przedstawione wyniki badań nad percepcją akcentu wyrazowego u dorosłych kobiet, które posługują się językiem polskim jako ojczystym. Materiałem językowym wykorzystanym w zadaniach percepcyjnych były trójsylabowe wyrazy i logatomy. Akustycznymi korelatami akcentu były wzrost wartości częstotliwości podstawowej oraz intensywności samogłoski akcentowanej. Uzyskane wyniki pokazują, że osoby biorące udział w badaniach nie miały trudności w różnicowaniu miejsca akcentu w prezentowanych bodźcach, natomiast gorsze wyniki osiągnęły one w zadaniach określania miejsca akcentowanej sylaby, szczególnie w zadaniach, w których bodźcami były wyrazy znaczące, nie zaś logatomy.
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