International Phonetic Alphabet Research Articles

Exploring the Lexical Influence of Arabic on Bahasa Indonesia: Phonetically Transcribed

The influence of one language on another is a common phenomenon, and given that Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, it is not surprising that it has influenced other languages. One such language is Bahasa Indonesia, which is spoken in Indonesia, one of the most populous nations in the world. There appears to be a lack of comprehensive analyses on the lexical influence of Arabic on Bahasa Indonesia. Such an analysis is an essential linguistic aspect that needs to be highlighted. Thus, this study aims to investigate the extent of the linguistic impact of Arabic on Bahasa Indonesia, specifically focusing on the lexicon. This research gathered data from twelve native speakers of Bahasa Indonesia, aged between 19 and 34, who were asked to produce Arabic lexical items. All Arabic loanwords in the data were identified and phonetically transcribed using International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. The findings revealed that Arabic has significantly impacted Bahasa Indonesia, enriching its lexicon in various domains, particularly in the religious domain, as well as in academic, political, and everyday language. The study concludes that Arabic has notably contributed to the development of Bahasa Indonesia’s vocabulary and recommends further research on other linguistic aspects such as semantics, phonology, or morphology.

Teaching Phonetics Online: Lessons From Before and During the Pandemic

Purpose: Online learning has been part of the educational landscape for a long time, but it came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020. As many courses moved online, faculty struggled to make their courses effective for students. Phonetics, with its focus on learning International Phonetic Alphabet transcription, was especially difficult to teach online. Fellow faculty members expressed difficulty communicating the content, offering transcription practice and feedback, engaging students, and applying the concepts clinically. Conclusion: This tutorial will address these issues and more with specific examples, websites, and explanations for faculty members to immediately implement in their (online) phonetics courses.

The Influence of a Mother Tongue on English Pronunciation While Acquiring English as a Second Language

This study aims to investigate the role of the mother tongue on English pronunciation in the acquisition of a second language. Many people face issues while acquiring English as a second language. These issues can be divided into two main categories: the impact of a mother tongue on second language and ineffective teaching approaches. This study focuses on the first category which means the influence of the native language of the learner on their acquisition of the target language. The researcher used a mixed method in the present study and asked the participants to record their voices while pronouncing certain vowels and consonants. After that, the data were collected and analyzed from audio recordings based on the International Phonetic Alphabet system. There are 40 participants including 20 females and 20 males from four nationalities: Saudi, Mexican, Turkish, Filipino. The results showed that the findings of the study answered the research questions about the influence of the mother tongue on learners’ pronunciation while acquiring English as a second language. It showed that participants faced problems because of the influence of their mother tongue. It also answered the second research question about the difference between L2 learners’ pronunciation based on their gender. In general, there was a difference between genders when pronouncing English by learners from different countries, where male participants had higher numbers of mispronunciations than female participants.

“Science is in everything, whether we realize it or not”: using the IPA to encourage interest in the scientific study of language

Abstract One way to bring greater awareness to the fact that language can be, and often is, studied scientifically is to show people the scientific tools that linguists use to study it, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This project investigated how doing a common IPA activity might influence people’s perceptions of language science and linguists. Adult visitors to a science museum (N = 117) participated in an activity in which they saw their name transcribed into the IPA and were guided to notice how it differed from the standard spelling, informed about some basic articulatory phonetics connected to the sounds in their names, and encouraged to think about the differences between sounds and letters more generally. Participants were then surveyed about what they had learned and their attitudes about language science. The results showed that most participants learned at least some of the core content material. More notably, the participants were more likely to believe that aspects of language such as poetry and dialects could be studied experimentally by scientists than a control group of adults who had not participated. These results demonstrate that even a brief intervention, if thoughtfully conducted, can shift attitudes towards the belief that language can be studied scientifically.

Open Brain AI and language assessment.

Neurolinguistic assessments play a vital role in neurological examinations, revealing a wide range of language and communication impairments associated with developmental disorders and acquired neurological conditions. Yet, a thorough neurolinguistic assessment is time-consuming and laborious and takes valuable resources from other tasks. To empower clinicians, healthcare providers, and researchers, we have developed Open Brain AI (OBAI). The aim of this computational platform is twofold. First, it aims to provide advanced AI tools to facilitate spoken and written language analysis, automate the analysis process, and reduce the workload associated with time-consuming tasks. The platform currently incorporates multilingual tools for English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. The tools involve models for (i) audio transcription, (ii) automatic translation, (iii) grammar error correction, (iv) transcription to the International Phonetic Alphabet, (v) readability scoring, (vi) phonology, morphology, syntax, semantic measures (e.g., counts and proportions), and lexical measures. Second, it aims to support clinicians in conducting their research and automating everyday tasks with "OBAI Companion," an AI language assistant that facilitates language processing, such as structuring, summarizing, and editing texts. OBAI also provides tools for automating spelling and phonology scoring. This paper reviews OBAI's underlying architectures and applications and shows how OBAI can help professionals focus on higher-value activities, such as therapeutic interventions.

Analysis of listening skills through rhymes and minimal consonant pairs

Teaching a second language requires developing appropriate listening skills. In this sense, this work was focused on analyzing these skills using rhymes and minimal consonant pairs in 5-year-old children for learning English. The sample was made up of 7 children. However, the participation of teachers was also considered to validate the experience. The study focused on carrying out listening activities, where the child could express himself spontaneously with his peers. The main results show that the children studied can learn a new language without major difficulties, however, teachers must have pedagogical strategies to carry out methodologies suitable according to the context and age of the students. In this sense, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is indispensable for this objective.

A Cross-Language Comparative Study of English and German Vowel Space Area in Swiss German L1 Speakers

It is conventional to examine vowel systems by their acoustic correlates, specifically formants. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) vowel chart, vowels are placed according to their relative positions determined by the first two formant values. This two-dimensional plane makes possible the calculation of the articulatory working space of vowels. Variations in the size and shape of the vowel space exist across gender, dialects, and languages. The present study focuses on comparing the vowel space area (VSA) in English and German produced by native Swiss German speakers, attempting to shed light on whether VSAs differ significantly with different calculation methods cross-linguistically. Given the fact that absolute formant values vary tremendously across gender, Hertz values are converted to z-scores, allowing for more direct and meaningful comparisons. While vowel normalization mitigates gender-related differences within specific languages to a large extent, there remains a significant cross-linguistic gender difference. The results reveal that for 3- and 4-vowel space there is no significant effect in language but an effect is observed in gender and vowel combination on VSA, specifically in terms of individual area and overlapping ratio. This suggests that Swiss German speakers tend to utilize the same amount of vowel space in both languages, with the only difference being the expansion of English VSA in higher F2 dimension and lower F1 dimension, as observed across all calculation methods.

A Phonetic Comparative Study of Mauritian Creole Kreol and Turkish - Twin Orthography Discussed

Located within an interpretivist paradigm, this study seeks to demonstrate the similarities in orthography between Turkish and Mauritian Creole with regard to the presence in both of these languages of lexemes that do not have only the same pronunciation and orthography but bear the same or approximate semantic value in most cases. These similarities constitute an element of intrigue, as Turkish and Mauritian Creole are not cognate languages. Yet, this study invites a reflection on the interconnection through mutual intelligibility, of these remote languages which are geographically located far apart from each other, one on the European and Asian border and the other in the Indian Ocean. The researcher adopts a synchronic approach to analyse aspects of both Turkish and Mauritian Creole with regard to their respective lexicons. An International Phonetic Alphabet presentation illustrates the common sound patterns justifying the orthography of each language in the context of this study.

English-Arabic Phonetic Dataset construction

In the field of natural language processing, the effectiveness of a semantic similarity task is significantly influenced by the presence of an extensive corpus. While numerous monolingual corpora exist, predominantly in English, the availability of multilingual resources remains quite restricted. In this study, we present a semi- automated framework designed for generating a multilingual phonetic English- Arabic corpus, specifically tailored for application in multilingual phonetically and semantic similarity tasks. The proposed model consists of four phases: data gathering, preprocessing and translation, extraction IPA representation, and manual correction. Four datasets were used one of them was constructed from many sources. A manual correction was used at all the levels of the system to produce a golden standard dataset. The final dataset was in the form (English Word, English Phonetic, equivalent Arabic Word, and Arabic Phonetic). Also, a deep learning approach was used for extracting International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) phonetic representation where the results for 13400 samples show that the Phonetic Error Rate (PER) and accuracy were 11.96% and 88.04 % respectively which are good results for producing IPA representation for unknown English and Arabic names.

Assessing Speech Production in Mandarin–English Bilingual Children: Comparison of Mandarin and English Sound Systems and Special Considerations

Purpose: When assessing bilingual children's speech, it is important to determine whether the errors are indicative of a true speech sound disorder or a speech sound difference. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide cultural and linguistic background of Mandarin in comparison to English and to outline the process of speech production assessment for Mandarin–English bilingual children. Method: Pertinent literature was reviewed around varieties of Chinese, unique features of the Mandarin sound system, commonly used transcription methods (International Phonetic Alphabet and Pinyin ), and patterns of Mandarin-influenced English. Previous research findings on the acquisition of consonants, vowels, and tones in monolingual Mandarin-speaking children were summarized. Results: The assessment process including consonants, vowels, tones, syllable structures, and lexical stress was described and illustrated with flow charts. Recourses related to cultural and linguistic information of Mandarin and accessible assessment materials are referenced. Conclusions: A thorough knowledge of a child's language background is crucial in planning assessment of speech production for Mandarin–English bilingual children. A comparative understanding of the sound systems of Mandarin and English facilitates clinical decision making.

Under the Surface: Rhoticity and Relevance in the Song “Surface Pressure” From Disney's Encanto

Purpose: The song “Surface Pressure” from the Disney film Encanto is believed to have a relatively high number of opportunities for production practice of rhotic speech sounds in comparison to conversational tasks. Given the effectiveness of meaningful activities in speech-language intervention, incorporation of this song into treatment has the potential to benefit speech-disordered children. Method: Transcription of “Surface Pressure” using the International Phonetic Alphabet was completed by two independent transcribers, and a consensus was reached on all discrepancies (94.8% consistency). Frequency of occurrence for different rhotic speech sounds was calculated. Results: The song “Surface Pressure” contains a proportionally high number of the uncommon American English stressed and unstressed schwars at 5.32% of the total phonemes in the entirety of the song, compared to 2.21% in conversational American English. Over 9% of the total phonemes are characterized by some degree of rhoticity, compared to 6.08% in conversation. Conclusions: The construction of “Surface Pressure” creates an accessible and authentic opportunity for targeting errored productions of rhotic speech sounds in a potentially culturally and socially relevant way. Similar analyses could justify the use of other distinctive children's movie songs in place of more traditional methods of elicitation for various speech disorder assessment and intervention needs, all with the objective of offering meaningful, authentic, and relevant opportunities for desired productions.

Phonological acquisition in Vietnamese-speaking children with central dialect

ABSTRACT The current study investigated the phonological development in 3 to 7-year-old Vietnamese-speaking children with central dialect. Previous studies of speech development in Vietnamese-speaking children have focused on northern and southern dialects. The central Vietnamese dialect has distinct dialectal features. Therefore, it is essential to examine speech acquisition in children with central dialect to diagnose speech sound disorders accurately. Speech samples were collected from 80 children. Two native Vietnamese speakers transcribed children's speech productions independently using IPA symbols. The percentage of consonants correct, the percentage of initial consonants correct, the percentage of final consonants correct, the percentage of semivowels correct, and the percentage of vowels correct were calculated for age and sex groups. Ages of acquisition of individual consonants and phonological patterns were also identified. Overall, central Vietnamese-speaking children showed similar speech acquisition patterns compared to children with northern and southern Vietnamese dialects and other languages (e.g., vowels and semivowels were acquired early, and bilabials were acquired earlier than retroflex sounds). However, several differences from other dialects were also found in the age of acquisition for individual consonants (e.g., initial consonants /v/, /c/ and final consonants /k/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/). Central Vietnamese-speaking children produced initial /b/, /j/, /s/, /r/ and final /k/, /ŋ/ as dialectal variants for initial /p/, /z/, /ʂ/, /ʐ/ and final /t/, /n/, respectively. The current study's findings help us obtain a more comprehensive understanding of speech acquisition patterns in Vietnamese children and Vietnamese dialectal variants.

The Effect of Phonetic Vowel Spelling Variances on Singers' Performed Vowel

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which various phonetic spellings of a single vowel can influence singers' performed vowel, and to explore whether the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) may provide an alternative to phonetic spelling in sheet music. I prepared two short, sight-singable melodies of similar range and difficulty; one had vowels written as IPA symbols under the staff, including the /u/ vowel, while the other had the vowels written out phonetically, including two occurrences of the /u/ vowel, spelled in two different ways ("oo" and "ooh"). Each participant (N=41) performed both conditions in a randomized order. I recorded their performances and used the linguistics software Praat to analyze the frequencies of the first and second formants (F1 and F2) for each condition. I found no significant differences in formant frequencies between the conditions. In their exit survey responses, many participants indicated that they recognized a difference in the pronunciation of "oo" and "ooh." Participants also indicated a slight, though not significant, preference for phonetic spelling over IPA. These results suggest that while some singers believe that "oo" and "ooh" should be sung differently, this belief is not reflected in their performance. Results also suggest that IPA is no better at eliciting a specific pronunciation than either phonetic spelling, and is not recommended as a replacement to phonetic spelling in sheet music. I discuss the implications of these findings for choral teachers and composers, and suggest avenues for further research.

THE DYNAMIC INTERPLAY OF PHONOLOGY AND SEMANTICS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATION

Phonology, semantics, and pragmatics are the three aspects of language fundamental to know how language works and how people process and use it. By examining the interaction between the memory hypothesis and linguistics in speech and semantic organization, this study seeks to better understand how individuals use language to express themselves. This study delves into finding out the association between phonology and semantics by developing a multi-faceted correspondence organization and applying ideas from computer network science and chart hypothesis. A correspondence framework of the International Phonetic Alphabet and semantic network examination in R was used to investigate the information once obtained through a web-based information gathering drive. As per the discoveries, the dynamic and ensnared association between phonology and semantics affects the correspondence that happens in the media. The aftereffects of this study offer new points of view on the idea of language and the job it plays in human communication. Understanding how semantics and phonics interact in different situations is essential for modern communication, this study is an effort to analyze the relation between words' meanings and sounds. By studying words usage in different mediums, we want to learn how these important elements affect platform interactions. Thus, the present study explains how semantics and phonology shape media and how this link can improve communication. The review suggests a multi-faceted framework that divides the linguistic framework into various layers with different hub relationships. This advanced four-layer contact network is designed to identify and analyze language confusion with precision and accuracy. It incorporates free associations, word associations, and three semantic layers to measure articulation, semantics, punctuation, and jargon. Using a comprehensive inside-and-out technique, this evaluation examines phonology and semantics through multi-faceted network analysis, allowing for effective assessment of language understanding and improvement.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0075/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

VSpace: A browser-based vowel synthesiser

Two-formant representation of the universal vowel space is a foundational model in phonetics (Fant & Risberg 1963; Traunmüller & Lacerda 1983), but tools for rapid synthesis of vowel sounds corresponding to points in the vowel space are limited. Stand-alone applications such as the Formant Synthesizer Demo (Beskow, 2000) provide this functionality, and rich tools for formant synthesis are available in Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2023), Matlab (Rabiner et al., 2023) and other platforms, but these tools are not universally accessible, while web-based speech synthesis tools (e.g., Thapen, 2017) do not typically allow systematic manipulation or quantification of key acoustic parameters. VSpace is a browser-based formant synthesizer developed using the Tone.js Web Audio framework. A universal vowel space is represented as a trapezoid scaled to typical male, female or child speaker formant ranges. Clicking on any point generates a vowel sound corresponding to the first and second formant frequencies selected, synthesized with typical F3 and F4 frequencies excited by a selectable source signal. IPA symbols corresponding to typical formant frequencies for language-specific vowel phonemes may be superimposed on the vowel space. Key synthesis parameters are configurable through the web interface to allow exploration of the acoustic consequences for vowel perception.

Flipping the script? Native-speaker linguists and colonial orthographies in nineteenth-century Senegal

Abstract Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial “scripts” by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes.

Four Secular Ruke Dongba Notes Generated during Fieldwork: An Innovative Language Documentation Approach

This paper documents and analyzes several Dongba script notes collected during my interviews with the Ruke Dongba priests. It provides an overview of Ruke Dongba glyphs in processing daily vocabulary and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It compares these Dongba pictographs with the Geba script, the syllabic writing system of Naxi people, as well as the various types of scripts used by some other ethnic groups, which show a general tendency of Romanization in the generation of alphabetic writing systems and provides a pattern inherent in the historical evolution of writing. IPA symbols, a fundamental tool of field linguists, facilitate learners in grasping a language and nonalphabetic scripts. In addition to analyzing the Ruke Dongba pictographs attested in the secular manuscripts in the context of history of writing, this study contributes to the linguistic description of Ruke Dongba culture and the diversity of Dongba tradition.

Stimulasi Kemampuan Berpikir Matematis Dalam Fisika Melalui Media Sosial

Physics learning at university level uses social media as a learning media. This research was conducted to determine the effect of social media in stimulating mathematical thinking skills on physics at university level. This research is a quantitative research and One Group Pretest-Posttest Design as data collection. A total of 20 students were selected by purposive sampling method as participants. Smartphone is used as a learning media and WhatsApp has choosen as social media to support physics learning. International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Keyboard and Math Keyboard installed on the WhatsApp to stimulate mathematics and symbols in Physics equations. The learning approach applied is problem based-learning (PBL) with Kinematics materials. The results showed that there was an increase in the stimulation of students' mathematical thinking skills before and after using WhatsApp as social media with additional features Math Keyboard and IPA Keyboard. Thus, social media can be used to improve mathematical thinking skills on Physics

Documentation and annotations of Megrelian texts in FLEx

Megrelian is an unwritten Kartvelian language subdivided into two dialects Zugdidi-Samurzaqano and Senaki-Martvili. Following the approaches widely used in language documentation, the Megrelian texts are described and analyzed by means of FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx). The FLeX provides interlinear glossing of data. At this moment the Megrelian database includes 49 analyzed texts (38510 tokens, 26610 unique forms, 3480 sentences). Dialogues and monologues are recorded in both dialect areas and include information about the beliefs, traditions, rituals etc. All texts are represented with free translations in Georgian and English. The analysis includes the following: Wordbase - division into words done automatically; Wordipa - representation of Megrelian text in IPA done by the online converter (Gersamia, Lobzhanidze 2022) developed to convert Megrelian based on Georgian script into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the ISO 9984 romanization scheme, the Gamkrelidze-Machavariani transliteration system (1965) and vice versa; Morphemes - morphological segmentation of words is done manually. The word is subdivided into root and affixes representing fixed linguistic data; The information on morphemes is given in Lex. Entries, the morphological glossing - in Lex. Gloss, while Lex. Gram. Info describes PoS-es and their appropriate categories. Glossing is done following the Leipzig Glossing Rules and Eurotyp Guidelines; Wordcat - information on PoS-es is given separately as well. The morphosyntactic annotation of Megrelian texts collected during the fieldwork and annotated by means of FLEx will be used as a base for the grammar and online dictionary.

Making a simple International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)—For singers, conductors and composers

This research develops a simplification of a graphical resource: the International Phonetic Alphabet. The choices made to simplify it are based on an analysis of existing diction methods. The thesis format seemed most suitable for my research, as the IPA is a graphical notation method which is meant to be used by writing it down. (While it is of course used to notate sounds, these sounds themselves are not actually the focus of the research. There are also already an abundance of audio examples for the IPA symbols.) The IPA can be a very useful aid for classical singers, from ensemble singers to soloists, but appears intimidating from the amount of symbols it has. This research looks at which IPA symbols are used and which are not used in five different diction methods for classical singers. These are systematically analysed and presented graphically to the reader to help visualise which of all the symbols presented on the IPA chart are regularly used by singers. The end result is practical in nature: a Simple IPA chart which uses only those symbols a classical singer really needs to sing the five main languages for classical singing: English, French, German, Italian and Latin.