Local Speech Research Articles

Perceptions of the design of voice output communication aids

Voice output communication aids (VOCAs) are a key form of aided communication within the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). In recent years, rapid developments in technology have resulted in an explosion of devices available commercially, yet little research has been conducted into what people who use VOCAs think about them. The aim of this research was to explore the perceptions of communication aid design from the perspective of end users and AAC professionals, with the objective being to inform and influence the design of future devices. A two-part study was conducted: interviews were undertaken with people who use VOCAs, and questionnaires were distributed to those who use aided communication and to AAC professionals. Analysis of the interview data was carried out using a qualitative method based on framework analysis, whilst descriptive statistics were generated from the questionnaire data. Interview participants were an opportunity sample of VOCA users within a defined region of the UK. Those recruited were over the age of 12 years and able to engage in the interview process; they were identified through the caseloads of local Speech and Language Therapists specializing in AAC. The questionnaire was marketed to the AAC community throughout the UK. Respondents were self-selecting as those using aided communication, their carers and AAC professionals. Eighteen people participated in the interviews. Questionnaires were completed by 43 people who use aided communication and 68 AAC professionals. The data suggest that current devices are considered to be neither reliable nor durable by users and professionals. Although features given a higher importance ranking are more likely to be perceived as available, a number of important design deficits are identified by users and/or professionals. Simplicity of design (and use) and the desire for devices which support communication that is as fast and spontaneous as possible also emerge as key requirements. Synthesis of the data produced a framework with three main themes covering the range of issues which influence the successful use of a VOCA: specific aspects of the design of a device; the consideration of the wider picture around the person; and the personal context in which someone uses their device. Although the original aim of the project was to establish the user requirements of VOCA design, the data indicate that the characteristics of the device cannot be considered in isolation. Those factors uncovered highlight questions about whether the design of communication aids is truly effective in meeting the needs of the people who use them. Based on these data, an initial specification for future device design is proposed.

In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau (review)

Reviewed by: In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau Hal Crimmel In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau. By Paul Lindholdt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. 146 pages, $19.00. Paul Lindholdt’s latest book is an engaging collection of first-person, literary nonfiction essays focused on the rural Pacific Northwest, primarily the Columbia Plateau bioregion, which includes slices of northern Idaho and much of Washington state east of the Cascades. The author’s deep knowledge of the Plateau and its surrounding regions is reflected in his fluency with local flora and fauna, landforms, and waterways. The essays describe the satisfaction of living a life where the non-built environment plays a significant role, but these celebratory place-based accounts are often weighed against the region’s history of environmental abuse. From the demise of wild salmon due to the damming of the Columbia River watershed, including the “tourniquet” of Grand Coulee Dam, which is like most other dams that act “as tombstones to the largest rivers in the American West,” to tragic stories of people “leaded” by smelter fallout from an Idaho silver mine to the severe air pollution resulting from wheat field stubble burning, Lindholdt condemns corporations and government entities that sacrificed the health of individuals, communities, and ecosystems for the sake of short-term profit (86, 84, 110). [End Page 310] Perhaps the most memorable essay in this regard is “In the Shadow of the Government’s Blind Eye,” an account of environmental apocalypse at the former Western Processing Company site, which is now one of the largest Superfund sites in the Pacific Northwest. As a young, blue-collar worker in 1974, the author risked his health disposing of industrial wastes from clients such as Boeing. He describes emptying—by hand—55-gallon drums of “heavy metals suspended in acids” and other toxic liquids into storage ponds (28). Clad in little more than rainslickers and boots, he and coworkers pump “chemical slurries straight to the dirt”; later he watches flames flicker out of the contaminated ground (31). Reading this, one wonders how frequently a similar story has played out across the West. In addition to the single-source water pollution from this site, the pall cast by other toxic by-products of industrial civilization spread far across the region—and across the nation—as such hazardous wastes were “recycled” as fertilizer, sold, and used in agriculture (33). Many Washington farm communities, for instance, fell victim to this practice when they unwittingly spread these contaminants onto their fields, resulting in sickly animals and poor crop yields. Readers hoping to find the romantic landscapes of an unspoiled West or idealized traditional Western culture are going to be disappointed. This collection offers instead a clear-eyed view of the region’s people and places, including critiques of such sacred cows as the rodeo circuit, which the author and his son see as a dubious form of entertainment, based as it is on the exertions of animals who have been “ridden, roped, panting, jerked, and spurred” for the benefit of audiences eating barbequed meat under hot western skies (134). For those who relish such honesty, the author’s keen ear for local speech contributes to the emerging portrait of place, with its prevailing conservative orthodoxy. One feels the tight cinch of convention when neighbors spread rumors that a local woman who left her husband took “‘her feminism down a recreational path’ by falling ‘in love with another woman. She had gone lesbian’—as if to say she had gone feral” (72). Sometimes personal matters become fodder for community gossip; other times they affect one’s sense of place as profoundly as the landscape and the culture. One example is “The Way to Open,” a chapter on rafting the Main Salmon River in Idaho. As part of a Forest Service–sponsored working trip to reduce the spread of spotted knapweed, an invasive species that poisons the soil around it, killing off native vegetation and preventing the growth of new plants, the author shares painful memories about his son’s drowning on Puget Sound, a reminder that the world has its own inexplicable agenda, an agenda that...

Enhancement of Residual Echo for Robust Acoustic Echo Cancellation

This paper examines the technique of using a noise-suppressing nonlinearity in the adaptive filter error feedback-loop of an acoustic echo canceler (AEC) based on the least mean square (LMS) algorithm when there is an interference at the near end. The source of distortion may be linear, such as local speech or background noise, or nonlinear due to speech coding used in the telecommunication networks. Detailed derivation of the error recovery nonlinearity (ERN), which “enhances” the filter estimation error prior to the adaptation in order to assist the linear adaptation process, will be provided. Connections to other existing AEC and signal enhancement techniques will be revealed. In particular, the error enhancement technique is well-founded in the information-theoretic sense and has strong ties to independent component analysis (ICA), which is the basis for blind source separation (BSS) that permits unsupervised adaptation in the presence of multiple interfering signals. The single-channel AEC problem can be viewed as a special case of semi-blind source separation (SBSS) where one of the source signals is partially known, i.e., the far-end microphone signal that generates the near-end acoustic echo. The system approach to robust AEC will be motivated, where a proper integration of the LMS algorithm with the ERN into the AEC “system” allows for continuous and stable adaptation even during double talk without precise estimation of the signal statistics. The error enhancement paradigm encompasses many traditional signal enhancement techniques and opens up an entirely new avenue for solving the AEC problem in a real-world setting.

William Barnes's Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide by T. L. Burton (review)

Reviewed by: William Barnes's Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide by T. L. Burton Graham Tulloch Burton, T. L. , William Barnes's Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide, Adelaide and Provo, UT, Chaucer Studio Press, 2010: cloth; pp. xx, 288; 1 map, audio CD; R.R.P. AU$75.00; ISBN 9780842527606. William Barnes was one of the great nineteenth-century autodidacts. Leaving school at thirteen, he taught himself many languages, learned to play three instruments, and wrote prodigiously. He had a particular interest in the history of the English language and its dialects but his poems in Dorsetshire dialect provide his principal claim to fame: the first was published in a local newspaper in 1834 and was followed by many others, including three collections. Barnes established himself as a major minor poet, carefully reproducing Dorset dialect in two different kinds of phonetic spelling. Thomas Burton's book addresses a particular problem, namely, how to pronounce Barnes's poems. To this end, he provides a detailed account of the realization of the twenty main vowels of English in Barnes's Dorset dialect; a similar treatment of consonants (including iconic features of west country dialects such as 'z' for Standard English 's'); line-by-line commentary on three poems; and phonetic transcriptions of eighteen poems. There are also three appendices containing Barnes's own writing about Dorset dialect and his specimen of Winterborne Came local speech, a table of key rhymes, and an index verborum, as well as an audio CD of readings and a map. Thus we have a whole box of tools with which to unlock the pronunciation Barnes intended for his poems - essential for reading his work since all his poetry is rhymed. [End Page 320] Burton's book draws on an enormous amount of detailed research, consulting specific studies of Dorset dialect (including Barnes's own), general works on English pronunciation, and general dialect surveys such as the monumental work of A. J. Ellis and later The Survey of English Dialects. All of this material has been mastered and expertly deployed; yet for such a technical subject it is all immensely readable. The value of this excellent book lies both in the intrinsic interest of the subject and in introducing us to the full enjoyment of a very fine poet. It is easy to forget just how important dialect poetry was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although we have only to think of Burns to realize what dialect poets were able to achieve. Barnes is an important part of this tradition and this book makes it possible for us to enjoy the aural subtleties of his work for the first time, perhaps, since his lifetime. Graham Tulloch School of Humanities Flinders University Copyright © 2012 by the Author

The Use of Ulster Speech by Michael Longley and Tom Paulin

The article examines the application and exploration of Ulster dialects in the work of two poets of Northern Irish Protestant background, Tom Paulin and Michael Longley. It depicts Paulin's attitude to the past and the present of their community of origin, the former positive and the latter negative, which is responsible for the ambiguities in his use of and his comments on the local speech. Both poets employ the vernacular to refer to their immediate context, i.e. the conflict in Ulster, and in this respect linguistic difference comes to be associated with violence. Yet another vital element of their exploration of the dialect is its link to their origins, home and the intimacy it evokes, which offers a contrary perspective on the issue of languages and makes their approach equivocal. This context in Paulin's poetry is further enriched with allusions to or open discussion of the United Irishmen ideal and the international Protestant experience, and with his reworking of ancient Greek myth and tragedy, while in Longley's poetry it is set in the framework of "translations" from Homer which, strangely enough, transport the reader to contemporary Ireland. While Longley in his comments (interviews and autobiographical writings) relates the dialect to his personal experience, Paulin (in his essays and in interviews) seems to situate it in a vaster network of social and political concepts that he has developed in connection with language, which in Ireland has never seemed a neutral phenomenon detached from historical and political implications. Longley's use of local speech is seldom discussed by critics; Paulin's, on the contrary, has stirred diverse reactions and controversies. The article investigates some of these critical views chiefly concerned with the alleged artificiality of his use of local words and with his politicizing the dialects. Performing the analysis of his poems and essays, the article argues for Paulin's "consistency in inconsistency," i.e. the fact that his application of dialectal words reflects his love-hate attitude to his community of origin, and that in the clash of two realities, of the conflict and of home, his stance and literary practice is not far from Longley's, which has been regarded as quite neutral as one can infer from the lack of critical controversy about it. The voices of the two poets and their use of local speech provide a crucial insight into the Northern Irish reality with all its intricacy and paradox.

¿QUÉ PASA?: “What’s Happening” in Overcoming Barriers to Serving Bilingual Children?

¿QUÉ PASA?: “What’s Happening” in Overcoming Barriers to Serving Bilingual Children?

<i>The English language in Canada: Status, history and comparative analysis</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The English language in Canada: Status, history and comparative analysis Beau Brock Charles Boberg. 2010. The English language in Canada: Status, history and comparative analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 272. $118.95 (softcover). The book under review contributes to the study of Canadian English by collecting and synthesizing previous studies on the language into one volume.1 The author also provides the results of two recent studies on Canadian vocabulary and phonetics, which update previous studies in those fields. The result is a book that provides an excellent introduction to the most important aspects of Standard Canadian English (SCE) and will serve as a starting point for those looking to examine other aspects of the language. Considering the wide scope of the book, this review will address only a few of the themes presented. The book is divided into six chapters, which focus on different aspects of SCE. The first chapter examines the current status of the language in Canada, including where it is used, by whom, and in what capacity. The second chapter is a discussion of the history and possible origins of Canadian English, and draws upon immigration statistics from the 18th century to the present day. The following three chapters describe the linguistic features that distinguish SCE from Standard American English (SAE) and Standard British English (SBE), namely its vocabulary, phonetic tendencies, and grammar. At the end of Chapter 3, the reader is introduced to previous studies on Canadian English, such as those in lexicography, regional dialect research, and sociolinguistics. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss studies conducted by the author on vocabulary and phonetics in SCE. The final chapter summarises the author’s findings, and includes suggestions for future research. It is also important to mention that the bibliography is substantial, containing texts from a wide variety of disciplines. It is an excellent companion to Avis and Kinloch’s Writings on Canadian English 1792–1975 (1978), significantly updating the latter with a wide variety of texts. The author begins his study by examining the current status of SCE, particularly in relation to other languages, and its role in the media. A detailed account is given of the diminishing status of English in Quebec, where its use has been curtailed in [End Page 277] recent years. It is noted that although native English speakers form the majority in Canada (18 million speakers in 2006), there are also a large number of Canadians who speak English or French as a second language (6 million in 2006), a fact which could influence the future development of the language. The author also discusses the relatively limited influence of SCE in the media, which has been dominated almost entirely by the United States, with a few notable exceptions. It is therefore difficult for Canadian English to flourish within its own borders due to the ubiquity of American produced media. The second chapter describes the history of English in Canada. The origins of SCE have been debated since the early 20th century (Bloomfield 1948, Avis 1954, to name only two). Though the author does not claim to resolve the debate in this book, he agrees with Chambers (2006), who stated that North American English originates from the language spoken by British settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries2 The language was then shaped by later settlers, including the American Loyalists in the late 18th century, as well as immigrants from the British Isles in the early 19th century. It is claimed that Canadian English was well established in the original four provinces by the 1860s3 and that further immigration did not change the local speech patterns. Much of this is supported by the numerous immigration statistics provided throughout the chapter. It is somewhat surprising that little mention is made of certain Anglo-Canadians’ attempt to maintain the British character of the language (spelling, lexicon, and grammar), as previously discussed in Chambers (2004). In the third chapter, the author describes the principal features of SCE by comparing it to SAE and SBE in order to determine which features are uniquely Canadian. To this end, the author draws upon several dictionaries of Canadian English, as well as previous lexicographical and...

Teaching English as a friendly language: lessons from the SCOTS corpus

This paper uses the interactional spoken data contained in the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) to investigate ‘friendly’ language and shows how its principles can inform a model of language for learners of English as a second or foreign language. Pragmatic markers used in local speech varieties are in danger of being neglected in an educational environment that privileges a common core lingua franca. This paper makes the case for raising awareness of local speech varieties in English as a lingua franca (ELF) and EFL curricula and demonstrates how corpora such as SCOTS can be exploited in the classroom. The SCOTS corpus contains several features useful to educators: it is freely available online and may be browsed and searched using integrated tools, including a concordance facility and a map showing the geographic location of authors/participants. The spoken language drawn on here is available as video/audio recordings with orthographic transcriptions and extensive demographic and textual metadata.

The Bible in two keys: Traditionalism and Evangelical Christianity on the Fort Apache reservation

This article examines contrasting entextualizations of the Bible across conflicting Traditionalist and Evangelical Christian identities on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona. On the one hand, each makes use of Apache language idioms and genre precedents to underwrite their respective claims to authentic Apache identities. On the other hand, each selects different components of that loosely shared repertoire of discursive precedents in their entextualizations of the Bible in order to articulate contrasting transformative projects for their community as well as to assert the contemporary relevance of their voices within differently imagined global orders. This analysis constitutes the local speech community as a locus of ethnolinguistic inquiry in which relations to encompassing social orders are mediated in part by the circulation of texts. In this process conventions and precedents serve as a reservoir of resources mobilized for use in competing strategies advanced by differently affiliated actors in dialogue with one another. In this way multiplicity and dynamism as a characteristic of local communities is defined as a crucial dimension of local–global discursive processes.

The Sociolinguistics of Ethnicity in Pittsburgh

AbstractRecently, there has been a growing interest in regional variation within African American English. This study reviews a work done on local speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discussing trends for both African American and White ethnic groups. Just as scholars have found in other geographic regions, in Pittsburgh, African Americans and Whites share a number of feature characteristics of the local dialect, but remain distinct in a number of other ways. Research in Pittsburgh, as elsewhere, highlights the complexity, rather than the homogeneity, of African American speech across the country, as speakers exhibit alignment to both regional and supraregional ethnic linguistic norms.

“If I lie, I tell you, may heaven and earth destroy me.” Language and Legal Consciousness in Hong Kong Bilingual Common Law

Based on an ethnographic study of courtroom interactions in the bilingual (Chinese/English) common law system in Hong Kong, this article investigates how language plays a constitutive role in shaping the ways people use, argue, and think about law. While the use of English in Hong Kong prescribes by default the supposedly universal speech act of statement-making, the presence of Cantonese allows local speech acts to be brought into the courtrooms. Two local speech acts, “catching fleas in words” and “speaking bitterness,” are discussed. The findings of this study suggest that by studying the local practices and beliefs in postcolonial settings, researchers can gain insights into the complex ways in which Anglo American–style legal institutions are reconstituted.

PITTSBURGHESE SHIRTS: COMMODIFICATION AND THE ENREGISTERMENT OF AN URBAN DIALECT

This article considers a type of material artifact that circulates ideas about regional speech in the United States: T-shirts bearing words and phrases thought to be unique to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I argue that Pittsburghese shirts, seen for themselves and in the context of their production, distribution, and consumption, are part of a process leading to the creation and focusing of the idea that there is a Pittsburgh dialect. To describe how particular locally hearable forms have become linked with the city, I invoke Asif Agha's concept of “enregisterment.” To understand why this has happened at the time and in the way it has, I draw on Arjun Appadurai's model of the “commodity situation.” I suggest that Pittsburghese shirts contribute to dialect enregisterment in at least four ways: they put local speech on display, they imbue local speech with value, they standardize local speech, and they link local speech with particular social meanings.

Linguistic Diversity, Access, and Risk

Rarely do we view educational risk from a perspective. There are noteworthy exceptions, among them Valdes (1996) and Zentella (1997). However, of the educational literature devoted to risk, the vast majority attends to the array of attributes and circumstances that perpetuate cycles of poverty (Williams, 1970). The aim of this discussion is to examine educational risk, paying particular attention to the possible existence of a linguistic stereotype threat. If such a threat does exist, it is very possible or even likely that stereotyping inhibits the academic achievement of many students who lack fluency in the dominant norms of their local speech communities. From a point of view, students in any speech community tend to fit within three general categories, including

Jezične značajke mjesnoga govora Janjine

U radu se opisuju jezične značajke govora sela Janjine koje se nalazi u središnjem dijelu poluotoka Pelješca. Daje se sažeti pregled jezičnih značajki govora koji dosad u literaturi nije precizno opisan ni fonološki ni morfološki, a ni na drugim jezičnim razinama. Opisuju se značajke koje su tipične za štokavsko narječje. Za jezičnu analizu poslužio je ogled mjesnoga govora Janjine snimljen na kazetofonsku vrpcu u srpnju 2006.

Event-related potential features of suprasegmental speech cues processing in infancy

Event Abstract Back to Event Event-related potential features of suprasegmental speech cues processing in infancy Anett Rago1*, Ferenc Honbolygó1, V. Csépe1, Zs Róna2 and A. Beke2 1 Research Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary 2 Department of Obsterics and Gynecology, Semmelweis University, Hungary During the process of language perception, infants have different tasks to solve. Phoneme perception studies revealed that normalization and categorical perception are essential features of speech comprehension. From behavioral and ERP studies we know that from the beginning of their life, young infants without special training or instruction have access to phonemic representation. Along with these local speech cues however there exist the so called suprasegmental speech cues that may also contribute to the transformation of input to the prelexical intermediate representation. One of these psycho-acoustic features is the word stress. We know from earlier studies that from 5 months of age infants are sensitive to the rhythmic properties of language inputs that are characteristic of their mother language. The stress though is a complex phenomenon. Different languages use different characteristics (pitch, length of syllables) to sign stress. In Hungarian, we use long vowels without stress on them; nevertheless the case is simple in that way that as a rule the stress is always on the first syllable. In this study, our aim was to investigate the difference between processing phonemic and rhythmic speech cues before the first year of life. In addition to this, we inquired into the developmental patterns characteristic of at risk infant groups (preterm infants) because of the need of early detection and correction of potential developmental irregularities. 33 6- and 10-month old, full-term and pre-term infants were participated in the experiment.We used a passive oddball paradigm with a standard Hungarian word ‘banán’ (‘banana’ in English) and two deviants: a voiceless phoneme deviant (‘panán’, which is meaningless in Hungarian), and a stress deviant where the stress was on the second syllable, instead of the first (‘ban:án’). Our results show that at the early ages (6 months of age) there were significant differences between the preterm and full-term infant groups in the two experimental conditions. At six months of age, special response-patterns were revealed in the full-term control group; there were huge responses for the standard and for both of the deviant stimuli. The normal ten months olds' response was quite the opposite. The pre-term responses were always between the two normal control groups'. The additional analyses revealed that for ten months of age even at-risk infants tend to show the normal response patterns but still in a rudimentary form. The response patterns from the different electrodes suggest great brain maturation differences. Conference: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster Presentations Citation: Rago A, Honbolygó F, Csépe V, Róna Z and Beke A (2009). Event-related potential features of suprasegmental speech cues processing in infancy. Conference Abstract: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.139 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 26 Mar 2009; Published Online: 26 Mar 2009. * Correspondence: Anett Rago, Research Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, rago@cogpsyphy.hu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Anett Rago Ferenc Honbolygó V. Csépe Zs Róna A. Beke Google Anett Rago Ferenc Honbolygó V. Csépe Zs Róna A. Beke Google Scholar Anett Rago Ferenc Honbolygó V. Csépe Zs Róna A. Beke PubMed Anett Rago Ferenc Honbolygó V. Csépe Zs Róna A. Beke Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Service users' acceptability of videoconferencing as a form of service delivery

We conducted a study of videoconferencing for delivering an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) service. AAC is a clinical field that attempts to compensate for the impairment and disability of people with severe expressive communication disorders. A total of 12 participant groups trialled initial AAC assessments via videoconference at a bandwidth of 768 kbit/s. The participant groups consisted of the client, the assessing speech and language therapist, and those who accompanied them to the session (usually their local speech and language therapist and any relatives or carers). Six of these groups progressed to receive review appointments. Following each of the sessions, all of the participants completed a questionnaire. Participants indicated an 88% satisfaction with the videoconference assessment session and a 95% satisfaction with review videoconference sessions. Clients provided the most positive feedback in their questionnaires, while the speech and language therapists were the most critical of the process. The findings suggest that an AAC service can be delivered effectively by videoconference.

Topónimos costeiros da ría de Cedeira

No presente traballo recóllense e estúdanse cento trinta e tres topónimos pertencentes a un pequeno treito da costa galega, o comprendido pola ría de Cedeira. As denominacións foron recollidas directamente da fala dos mariñeiros da zona, con todas as súas variantes e tal como eles as empregan e pronuncian, sen aplicar, xa que logo, ningún criterio normativizador. O estudo divídese en dúas partes fundamentais: na primeira, de carácter puramente descritivo, rexístranse ortograficamente e en transcrición fonética os topónimos para sometelos a continuación a unha clasificación e análise morfolóxica, semántica e mesmo sociolingüística. E, finalmente, na segunda parte faise un estudo etimolóxico de cada un dos topónimos, distribuídos en tres estratos cronolóxico-lingüísticos diferentes: latinos anteriores á formación do galego, latino-medievais e romances, incluíndo nestes últimos non só os propiamente galegos, senón tamén os –máis recentes– traídos do castelán ou influenciados por el.

Interpreting Intra-Regional Southern Vowel Distinctions

n/a

Subjective Evaluation of Techniques for Proper Name Pronunciation

Automatic pronunciation of unknown words of English is a hard problem of great importance in speech technology. Proper names constitute an especially difficult class of words to pronounce because of their variable origin and uncertain degree of assimilation of foreign names to the conventions of the local speech community. In this paper, we compare four different methods of proper name pronunciation for English text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The first (intended to be used as the primary strategy in a practical TTS system) uses a set of manually supplied pronunciations, referred to as the ldquodictionaryrdquo pronunciations. The remainder are pronunciations obtained from three different data-driven approaches (intended as candidates for the back-up strategy in a real system) which use the dictionary of ldquoknownrdquo proper names to infer pronunciations for unknown names. These are: pronunciation by analogy (PbA), a decision tree method (CART), and a table look-up method (TLU). To assess the acceptability of the pronunciations to potential users of a TTS system, subjective evaluation was carried out, in which 24 listeners rated 1200 synthesized pronunciations of 600 names by the four methods using a five-point (opinion score) scale. From over 50 000 proper names and their pronunciations, 150 so-called one-of-a-kind pronunciations were selected for each of the four methods (600 in total). A one-of-a-kind pronunciation is one for which one of the four methods disagrees with the other three methods, which agree among themselves. Listener opinions on one-of-a-kind pronunciations are argued to be a good measure of the overall quality of a particular method. For each one-of-a-kind pronunciation, there is a corresponding so-called rest pronunciation (another 600 in total), on which the remaining three competitor methods agree, for which listener opinions are taken to be indicative of the general quality of the competition. Nonparametric tests of significance of mean opinion scores show that the dictionary pronunciations are rated superior to the automatically inferred pronunciations with little difference between the data-driven methods for the one-of-a-kind pronunciations, but for the rest pronunciations there is suggestive evidence that PbA is superior to both CART and TLU, which perform at approximately the same level.

How'd you get that accent?: Acquiring a second dialect of the same language

This article presents a case study of second dialect acquisition by three children over six years as they shift from Canadian to British English. Informed by Chambers's principles of second dialect acquisition, the analysis focuses on a frequent and socially embedded linguistic feature, T-voicing (e.g., pudding versus putting). An extensive corpus and quantitative methods permit tracking the shift to British English as it is happening. Although all of the children eventually sound local, the acquisition process is complex. Frequency of British variants rises incrementally, lagging behind the acquisition of variable constraints, which are in turn ordered by type. Internal patterns are acquired early, while social correlates lag behind. Acceleration of second dialect variants occurs at well-defined sociocultural milestones, particularly entering the school system. Successful second dialect acquisition is a direct consequence of sustained access to and integration with the local speech community.We would like to thank Tara, Shaman, and Freya for their patience and humor in letting us analyze these materials, and especially for the hilarity of their antics, which added greatly to the amount of fun we had in figuring out their second dialect acquisition. This study was inspired by and has also profited from many discussions with our mentor and friend Jack Chambers. We have also benefited from the insightful guidance of Peter Trudgill, both in print and in personal commentary. An anonymous reviewer added an additional perspective. Of course, none of them is responsible for any remaining shortcomings of our analysis or interpretation.