English Utterances Research Articles

The use of reported speech and the perceived neutrality of court interpreters

A mock trial, with two-way consecutive interpreting between Cantonese and English, was used to test perceptions of a court interpreter’s neutrality when interpreting into Cantonese in reported rather than direct speech. Monolingual Cantonese speakers played the part of witnesses using the interpreter. Three groups were created: a control group (16 participants), receiving interpretation of all English utterances into Cantonese in direct speech; and two experimental groups (17 participants each). The experimental groups received interpretation with occasional switches to reported speech. These were introduced by third person pronouns (e.g., “he said”) for one group (the ‘pronoun group’), and by professional titles (e.g., “the judge said”) for the other group (the ‘title group’). Participants afterwards completed a questionnaire, assessing neutrality and alignment on a 5-point Likert scale. The title group not only perceived the interpreter to be aligned with the English speakers, but also gave a significantly different assessment of neutrality from the control group. The pronoun group perceived the interpreter to be aligned with them, but did not differ significantly from the control group in their perception of neutrality. Use of pronouns or professional titles in the reporting clauses thus affected the interpreter’s perceived neutrality differently.

The importance of being earnest

Mock Spanish is a register in which Spanish words or phrases are used in otherwise English language texts or utterances to evoke humor, often indexing an unflattering image of Spanish speakers. This paper examines the occurrence of Mock Spanish in mass media, of interest in part because its use there cannot be mitigated so much as is possible in private speech by factors such as the speaker’s or writer’s intentions or relationships with addressees. Participants in previous studies have cited these factors as potential attenuators of Mock Spanish’s offensiveness. Mass media is also of interest for its role in the reproduction of elite discourses. This paper’s objective is to further engage the question of Mock Spanish as a form of racist discourse, and to examine the implications for those who are users of Spanish as a second language or are in the business of training second language users of Spanish.

Voices Without Words: Doing Critical Literate Talk in English as a Second Language

Critical thinking is believed to be an essential skill for 21st century survival and therefore has been widely promoted in education. In Hong Kong, critical thinking is one of nine generic skills to be developed across all subjects, including English. How students do critical thinking in ESL, which is seldom used outside school and yet holds high social value, has, however, been underresearched. This article is concerned with how some low-English-proficiency senior secondary students in Hong Kong conducted critical talk in English. The study specifically investigates how the students used English to express ideas that were first developed in Cantonese (the students' first language). Based on a discourse analysis of the criticality and elaborateness of the Cantonese and English utterances of one group of students, the authors discuss findings that reveal a significant contrast between the students' more elaborated discourse in Cantonese and a restricted discourse in English characterised by reduced content and limited lexicogrammatical structures. The findings call for more attention to the impacts of linguistic proficiencies on critical thinking performance of ESL learners and to how the communicative gaps in critical literate talk revealed in ESL learners' first and second languages can be gradually reduced.

Can adjustment to accented speech affect native language perception?

The human auditory system can quickly accommodate foreign-accented speech. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying perceptual adjustment to non-native speech are not fully understood. The current study examined the perceptual consequences of adaptation toward foreign-accented speech on native language perception. Native English speakers performed an auditory shadowing task on word-length utterances in English. There were four blocks of trials. The words in the critical block (Block 3) were spoken by either a native American English speaker or a native Spanish speaker. The speaker in flanking blocks (Blocks 1–2, 4) was the same speaker, a different speaker with the same accent, or a different speaker with a different accent. Shadowing response times in the critical block were used to assess rapid perceptual adjustment and readjustment. Results showed that the nature of the preceding context influenced response times. Response times for items in the first quartile of the critical block were reliably slower when accent and talker changed than when accent and talker remained constant. These findings suggest that listeners develop perceptual expectations about ongoing speech, which when violated incur a short-term processing cost even for spoken words in the listeners’ native language.

Diary of a Bilingual School by Sharon Adelman Reyes, James Crawford (review)

Reviewed by: Diary of a Bilingual School by Sharon Adelman Reyes, James Crawford Jennifer Austin Adelman Reyes, Sharon, and Crawford, James. Diary of a Bilingual School. Portland, OR: Diversity Learning K12, 2012. Pp. 120. ISBN: 978-0-9847317-0-1. Diary of a Bilingual School is an ethnographic account of a year spent observing a second-grade classroom at the Inter-American Magnet School, a dual immersion program in Chicago where students from diverse language backgrounds learn academic content in Spanish and English. The book would be particularly useful for parents or educators who are unfamiliar with dual immersion education and would like some insight into the dynamics of one such classroom, as well as for reinforcing effective pedagogical practices for immersion teachers. In addition, it would be useful as a supplementary text for an undergraduate course on bilingual education. Clearly written and accessible for non-specialists, Diary of a Bilingual School’s first two chapters (“Fundamentals”) provide a brief introduction to the history of dual language instruction and the founding of the Inter-American Magnet School. They also introduce the reader to terminology and theories relevant to bilingual educational models and language acquisition as well as contrasting constructivist with traditional approaches to instruction. The introduction is followed by four chapters (“Narratives”) containing detailed, vivid descriptions of day-to-day classroom interactions interspersed with commentary by the authors. The narratives are structured around curricular units, such as “Nincas and ninfas,” which bring [End Page 799] to life the interactions between the children and the teacher in the classroom, as well occasional exchanges between the children and their parents at home. The book’s epilogue “Outcomes: Schooling for Life” tells what became of the children fifteen years later and draws conclusions about the impact that dual immersion education made on their future lives. The greatest strength of the book is that it contains a wealth of lively anecdotes that recount dialogues between the children and their teacher, illustrating and contextualizing the children’s linguistic and academic growth. The authors skillfully interpret these anecdotes for the reader in order to outline general principles of bilingual development in children as well as successful strategies for teaching in an immersion classroom. For example, the authors provide a wonderful illustration of early metalinguistic awareness in a child who, speaking through an imaginary English-speaking character that is acquiring Spanish, slowly alters a Spanish nursery rhyme, first through an Anglicized accent and later through lexical choices, so that the verses become bilingual. In the section “Counteracting the Prevalence of English,” the authors convey the challenges of imparting academic content exclusively through Spanish in a linguistically diverse classroom in which most of the children are English-dominant bilinguals. The teacher’s tactics for enforcing the use of Spanish in the classroom, including recasting children’s English utterances in Spanish and using visual aids and gestures to promote comprehension, would be useful for both teachers and parents in a dual language environment. The authors’ analysis of the instructional approach used in the school, which they describe as progressive or constructivist, is more speculative and less research-based than their discussion of the impact of dual immersion. For example, they argue that “dual immersion tends to incorporate constructivist strategies. The fact that it does so may help to account for its academic successes, especially for English language learners (a hypothesis that admittedly remains untested by researchers)” (17). While it is possible that the use of a constructivist approach to teaching played a role in the academic accomplishments of the children at the Inter-American Magnet School, another possibility left unexplored by the authors is that dual language instruction promotes achievement through the very act of becoming bilingual. Research suggests that becoming bilingual in childhood through immersion education enhances executive function, a cognitive ability highly correlated with academic success, so it is also possible that bilingualism itself plays a more important role in boosting academic outcomes than any particular pedagogical method (see Hermanto, Moreno, and Bialystok, 2012). The widely touted cognitive benefits of bilingualism receive scant mention in the book; however, Diary of a Bilingual School does base its discussion of dual immersion strategies and second language acquisition throughout the...

Performance analysis of a matcher in a lexical access system based on landmarks and distinctive features

Performance characteristics of a prototype matcher in a lexical access system based on landmarks and distinctive features are analyzed. A database of 16 CONV files containing spontaneous American English utterances produced by 8 female speakers is annotated with words, and phone sequences derived from the word sequences are generated using the CMU phone-based dictionary. Predicted landmark and distinctive feature sequences are then generated using context-dependent rules from the phone sequences. These labels are used to map back to a lexicon which is also represented in terms of landmarks and distinctive features. The results for using core lexicons consisting of words within a CONV file show an average match rate of about 23% using only manner-class-related landmarks, and about 93% using the distinctive feature labels. Using an expanded lexicon combining all core lexicons lowers average match rates, by about 7% using landmark labels, and by 4% using the distinctive feature labels. These results provide characteristic rates for using linguistically motivated features to match to a lexicon, for both the landmark labels and for the more detailed distinctive feature labels.

Introducing very young children to English as a foreign language

This paper describes how two very young Polish children were introduced to English through children's animation series, with meaning being made clear through translation. The children were first exposed to English when they were 21 months. After two years of exposure, documentation of their English utterances took place over a period of six weeks starting when the children were four years and three months. The children's use of language is compared with utterances produced by children attending monolingual English instruction in a formal setting. The comparison shows a more spontaneous and creative use of English by the children in this study. This indicates that a bilingual approach in which children simply experience a foreign language at home may be more effective than monolingual teaching in a formal setting.

A study on the comprehensibility of Korean speakers’ English utterances and affecting factors for native and non-native English listeners.

A study on the comprehensibility of Korean speakers’ English utterances and affecting factors for native and non-native English listeners.

Intonation perception in English: Effects of stimulus amplitude and listeners’ language background

The contour of fundamental frequency (F0) of the final word is the primary acoustic cue for intonation production and perception in English utterances. On the other hand, speakers of Mandarin Chinese may have to use other acoustic cues such as amplitude and duration rather than F0 contours to differentiate intonation contrasts since F0 contours carry lexical meaning in Mandarin Chinese. The goal of this study was to examine the role of the final word amplitude in intonation perception of English sentences. The final word amplitude was manipulated at three levels relative to the carrier sentence: −6, 0, and +6 dB. F0 contours of the final word were controlled continuously from falling to rising patterns. Listeners’ task was to identify the sentence intonation: question or statement. Preliminary results showed the intonation boundary shifted from slightly falling F0 contours to slightly rising F0 contours as the final word amplitude decreased for Chinese listeners, but the boundary did not change for the three amplitudes for English listeners. These results imply that Chinese listeners may use the final word amplitude as a secondary cue to perceive intonation contrasts in English, while English listeners may primarily rely on F0 contours for intonation perception.

Learning Activities Activating Kindergartners to Learn to Speak English in an EFL Indonesian Setting

The study tries to investigate what learning activities activating kindergartners to learn to speak English and to describe the language producion. It involves four kindergartners from different schools. The data were collected through observations and interviews and then analysed by constant comparisons. The findings revealed there were four commonalities of the learning activities, namely, (1) answering questions in English; (2) listening to a model speaking English; (3) imitating, and (4) repeating the English utterances. Among the four, answering questions was the most frequent way. Meanwhile, the language production varied covering single word utterances, verb phrases, simple sentences (S+V+O) or (S+V+O+Adv.)in simple present tense, and exclamation. The proposition generated from the present study is that kindergartners will learn to speak English if they are often asked questions in English which they understand and are engaged in an interaction in English where they need to listen, imitate, and repeat

The Effect of the Arabic Syllabic Prosodic Features on the Production of English CV Sequences

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of the Arabic minimal prosodic unit (the syllable) on the production of English L2 CV sequences. To study the influence of phonetic context upon a given segment and the overall effect the Arabic syntagmatic features on the Arab learner's ability to reorganize in terms of English patterns, samples of conversational exchanges of some native speakers of adult/child Jordanian Arabic were recorded over a two month period. The syllable patterns that regulate the phonological organization of the conversational exchanges were described. To study the effect of the preceding and following consonants on the adjacent vowel sounds, two sets of consonantal contexts were examined: 'emphatic' vs. 'non-emphatic'. The objectives of this study are the following: (i) to identify prosodic features which span the internal structure of the Arabic word templates, e.g. the vocalic melody of frontness vs. backness (ii) to explore the Arabic language-specific phonological constraints and to determine their effect on the production of English sound patterns (iii) to study the Arabic templates which are similar in shape to English equivalents, because contrastive linguistics studies, to date, have so far focused on phonological negative interlingual transfer to the effective exclusion of positive interlingual transfer . (vi) to demonstrate how English utterances are restructured so that the constituent syllables follow typical Arabic syllabication.

Detecting foreign accent in monosyllables: The role of L1 phonotactics

The present study investigated whether native listeners can detect a foreign accent in short, slightly accented utterances and also whether such information is related to the non-native talkers' native language (L1) phonotactics in terms of segments and syllable structures. To answer these questions, we examined eight native listeners' sensitivity (d′ values) to a foreign accent in a two-alternative forced choice task. Four L1 Korean learners of L2 English with high L2 proficiency along with two native speakers of English produced the test materials consisting of monosyllabic English utterances. The monosyllabic corpus included stimuli having both permissible (CV and CVC) and impermissible syllable structures (CCV and CCVC) in the non-native talkers' L1. The singleton onsets consisted of various segments in terms of Korean phonotactics and the cluster onsets included /l/ or /ɹ/. The results indicated that all the listeners detected a foreign accent from hearing the monosyllabic stimuli. Furthermore, the listeners detected a foreign accent more often from the stimuli with “new” L2 segments than those with “similar” L2 segments, regardless of syllable structure types. The present study demonstrates the L1 segmental phonotactics effects in foreign accent detection. The present study also supports and further demonstrates Flege (1984)'s finding that listeners are sensitive to foreign accent and that they do not need much information (e.g., sentences) to detect a foreign accent, even in proficient L2 learners' productions.

Exploring Elision of Schwa of /ə/ in English Utterances by C & U English Majors

An acoustic study on the elision of schwa [ʃwɑ:] of /ə/ in English utterances produced by a native speaker of English, a Han Chinese learner of English major, [C] and a Uyghur learner of English majors [U] presented in this paper. With Praat software, three acoustic parameters-fundamental frequencies [F0], the first formant [F1] and the second formant [F2]-are measured with two tiers (syllables and words). The results show that the Uyghur learner of English major produces the elision (omission) of schwa in the same way as the native speaker of English does, while the Han Chinese learner of English major produces schwa of /ə/ in English poorly. The paper indicates that the Elision of Schwa in English produced by learners is influenced by the transfer of their mother tongues. Thus, it enlightens that the second [L2] or third language [L3] speech acquisition is restricted by phonological system of their mother languages, and the contrastive study of the phonological system of the native tongue and the second or third language will give us scaffolding in our phonetic instruction, especially in the teaching of Schwa /ə/ and others in English utterances of Chinese and Uyghur English majors.

Lexical effects on the perception of /l/ allophones in English

Previous work has shown that perception of allophones of /p/ in English utterances was influenced by lexical status. In nonwords, the aspirated allophone was preferred whether appropriate or not; in words, the appropriate allophone was preferred [Whalen, Best, & Irwin (1997), J. Phonetics, 25, 501-528]. Here, we examined dark and light [l] in English words and nonwords. Dark [l] occurs in syllable codas whereas light [l] occurs in onsets. Items were selected in pairs to balance syllable position in monosyllabic English words and pseudowords, such as “gel”/“ledge”, “teal”/“leat”, and “beel”/“leeb.” Frequency of occurrence for words was also manipulated to explore compatibility with versions of exemplar theory. A phonetician produced two versions of each item, one with a contextually appropriate allophone and one with the inappropriate. Listeners were asked to rate where each acoustically presented item fell on a Likert scale (1-7) between “ideal (native) pronunciation” or “bad (nonnative) pronunciation.” Results will be discussed in terms of the underlying representation needed to account for lexical effects in perception. The relationship to phonotactic rules will also be discussed.

TRANSFER OF JAVANESE CULTURE IN THE PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH UTTERANCES AND ITS POSSIBLE IMPACT ON INTER-CULTURAL INTERACTION

This brief paper discusses the ways Javanese speaking English produce utterances in English which show transfer and influence from Javanese culture . It argues that cultural transfer from first language has possible negative impact in intercultural interaction . First, some important characteristics of Javanese culture will be discussed, then examples of utterances commonly produced by Javanese speaking English will be given . The writer collected the data from his classroom activities, his personal experience and also from limited studies on the ways Javanese speaking English produce certain acts by using questionnaires . Finally this paper argues that as cultural transfer may influence the smoothness of interaction between Javanese speaking English with speakers English of other cultures and particularly with native speakers of English, it is essential that teachers as well as learners of English in Indonesia should be aware of such cultural transfer and include the discussion of cultural differences in their teaming process.

Face and Speech Recognition Fusion in Personal Identification

Security personnel manning access points most often based their access authorisation on recognition of faces. And it is also very common to base access decision for a person knocking at the door on recognition of his/her voice. The conventional manual method of drawing attention by knocking the door, pressing door bell, or/and shouting one’s presence in order to gain access are inefficient and risky. A better method is automatic personal identification based on face and speech recognition which is the subject of this paper. Eigenface method is used for the face recognition. While the speaker and spoken command recognition are both based on the same mel-frequency cepstral coefficients as feature vectors extracted from English and Yoruba utterances. Experiments yielded 90% face recognition while recognition rates for speakers and the spoken commands were 87% and 74% for utterances in English and Yoruba respectively. However, the final recognition decision for authorisation or access activation is based on the recognition outcomes of the face recognition and the speech recognition. General Terms Biometric Pattern Recognition

Stress Shifts of English Utterances Made by Indonesian Speakers of English (ISE)

This article examines students’ understanding on stress placement in English words. The objectives of the study were to find out: i) the types of English stress shifts made by university students, and ii) the most frequently English stress shifts made by students. There were 27 students participated in this research. They were students of first semester of English Language and Literature State University of Makassar who attended English Phonology subject. This research was qualitative and the instrument used was test. The test was vocabulary list and the students were asked to give primary stress on the word(s). Those words were ranging from one syllable to five syllables.

CULTURAL AWARENESS FOR ENGLISH LEARNERS

Abstract The purpose of this study is how to enhance cultural awareness for English learners in Indonesia. Culturally, the learners have got accustomed to using Indonesian mind set or Indonesian expression style rather than native English style. The aim of teaching learning language is that learners should have communicative competence. The communicative competence model (Celce-Murcia et al) introduces that the main competence of communicative competence is discourse competence. The discourse competence can be achieved if the learners have socio-cultural competence, linguistic competence and actional competence. It means that teaching English involves not only knowledge of linguistic aspects and speech act or rhetoric aspects but also socio-cultural aspects, certain features and characteristics of the culture. In the teaching learning process, language and culture are considered interconnected. It can be stated that a language is a part of culture and a culture is a part of a language. Language cannot be taught without reference to cultural context. By understanding socio-cultural contexts, learners can encounter the factors of cultural differences. English teachers should acknowledge English expressions to the learners in English cultural contexts. In order to help teacher in assisting learners to overcome cultural problems, some activities recommended are role plays, simulation, games, readings, watching English films, inviting native speaker to attend a classroom, giving assignment to the learners to meet native speaker, and cross cultural gathering with expatriates. Thus, the English learners are expected to be able to use English as a means of communication in various spoken and written English contexts. Moreover, the development of the learners?óÔé¼Ôäó cultural awareness leads them to more critical thinking. The learners are more creative and have a sensitivity of culture in producing English utterances. In other words, the learners should have made efforts how to use English communicatively. Pedagogical implication for teaching English as a foreign language should consider English cultural elements integrated in English teaching-learning activities in order to gain communicative competence. Regardless of different point of views, the aim of this study provides necessary information of cultural awareness for the English teachers and learners and that of teaching learning activities incorporating the target language and its culture. Keywords: ?é?ácultural awareness, communicative competence, socio-cultural competence

A socio friendly approach to the analysis of emotive speech

This paper describes certain findings of intonation and intensity study of emotive speech with the minimal use of signal processing algorithms. This study was based on six basic emotions and the neutral, elicited from 1660 English utterances obtained from the speech recordings of six Indian women. The correctness of the emotional content was verified through perceptual listening tests. Marked similarity was noted among pitch contours of like-worded, positive valence emotions, though no such similarity was observed among the four negative valence emotional expressions. The intensity patterns were also studied. The results of the study were validated using arbitrary television recordings for four emotions. The findings are useful to technical researchers, social psychologists and to the common man interested in the dynamics of vocal expression of emotions.

Realistic Face and Lip Expressions for a Bilingual Humanoid Robot

Abstract Hala is a bi-lingual (Arabic and English) robot receptionist located at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar. Hala is presented to users as a 3-D animated face on a screen. Users type to her, and she replies in speech synced with realistic facial expressions. However there are two existing problems with the robot. First, Hala's animation engine does not fully adhere to existing research on face dynamics, which makes it difficult to create natural and interesting facial expressions. Natural expressions help towards an engaging user experience by articulating non-verbal aspects (ex: confusion, glee, horror, etc). Second, while speaking in Arabic lip-movements are not realistic because they were adopted from English utterances. In this work we address these two limitations. Similar to the movie and video-game industry, we leverage Paul Ekman's seminal work on Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to demarcate Hala's 3D face model into muscle-primitives. These primitives are used to compose complex, yet natural, facial expressions. We have also authored an in-house tool, which allows non-programmers (for ex: artists) to manipulate the face in real-time to create expressions. The sounds humans make while talking are symbolically captured as “phonemes”. The corresponding shapes of the lips, for these sounds (i.e. phonemes), are called “visemes”. We used existing research and observed each other (and a mirror), to develop visemes that accurately capture Arabic pronunciations. Hala can thus utilize English and Arabic visemes for accurate lip-movement and syncing. We empirically tested and evaluated our work by comparing it with previous lip movements for common Arabic utterances. Nonetheless, certain pronunciations can fire less-than-ideal visemes if they are preceded by silence. Upon identifying and addressing these limitations, Hala has 11 new facial expressions for a more natural looking and behaving robot. This work also pioneered the first implemented subset of Arabic visemes on a robot.