Pronunciation Similarity Research Articles

Homonymy Related English Vocabulary Learning: Investigating the Difficulties of the Third Year Students

Homonymy, as a type of lexical relations between words, is a significant linguistic phenomenon which has received a lot of attention in recent years. English contains numerous homonymous forms with different meanings, which often cause confusion for EFL/ESL learners. In line with that, this research was carried out primarily to investigate the linguistic difficulties of learning and teaching homonymy in English in the Yemeni context. Hence, this data-oriented descriptive study was designed to investigate the difficulties in learning using homonymous English words as the data of the study. A total sample of 80 third-year English major students and 20 of their teachers at the Faculty of Education, Aden, University of Aden, were selected randomly as the subjects for this study. The qualitative and quantitative data required for this investigation were collected by employing two research instruments: a diagnostic test and a questionnaire. The major findings of the study revealed that phonological and orthographical identities of homonymic words, ‘unrelatedness’ of meanings, similarity in pronunciation, insufficient vocabulary size and knowledge, inadequate practice, poor focus in the course materials and stereo-typed teaching methodology contribute to learner difficulties with homonymy. Significantly, the literature survey and the findings of this work would be a modest contribution to vocabulary teaching and learning with special reference to homonymy.

Semantic Analysis of Synonymy in The Qur’anic Verses In Surat Yusuf

This research attempts to study the various qur’anic words in terms of similarity in pronunciation and in meaning. The researcher carried out a semantic analysis concerned with the synonymy in the Quranic verse in Surat Yusuf. The researcher's approach is to analyse the verses in which the words have synonymy in meanings. The words were recorded and organized according to the types of synonymy and its divisions, with an explanation of what might be needed from the evidence and the opinions of ancient scholars. The researcher concluded that the synonymy in the terminology is the indication of two or more different words having one name, one meaning, or one indication. In the words of ancient linguists, (words that differ in the pronunciation and have the same meaning) and the types of linguistic synonymy are complete synonymy, semi-synonym (Overlapping), semantic relation, disparity in the general pronunciation, disparity in the strength of meaning, and variance in specification. The synonyms that occur in the Holy Qur’an in Surat Yusuf are (مكّنenabled) (make جعل ), (to bring أتى) and (giveأعطى ), )dreams (أحلام and (vision (رؤيا , )evil (السوء and (immorality(الفحشاء , )plot (كيد and (deception (المكر .

PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATING SYNONYMS AND HOMONYMS IN THE HOLY QURAN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO QURANIC TRANSLATIONS BY YUSUF ALI AND AHMED ALI

The semantic phenomena of synonymy and homonymy are considered a problem in translation since the translators have to choose between more than one equivalents taking into consideration the exact nuances in meaning. Regarding the translation of the Holy Quran, synonymy and homonymy also remains a controversial issue among Arab scholars who did not agree about the existence of these two semantic phenomena in the Holy Quran, therefore, translators most of the time fail in translating synonyms and homonyms in The Holy Quran. This study focused on the problems that faced the two translators Yusuf Ali and Ahmed Ali during their translations of some synonymous and homonymous words in The Holy Quran. The main problem was that the two translators depended on the literal translation method to translate synonymous and homonymous words in many cases. The second problem that this study focused on that the two translators ignored the similarity in pronunciation between Arabic language and English language. It focused on one of the main reasons behind these difficulties, which is the translator's ignorance of the exegeses of The Holy Quran.

Student’s Problem in Listening Skill of Vocational High School At Dharma Budi Sidamanik

This article describes the problem faced by students in Listening Skills at Vocational High School level, in particular it discusses (1) problems they face in listening to English and (2) how the teacher solves the problem. This research uses qualitative descriptive, and was conducted at Vocational High School at Dharma Budi Sidamanik, Sidamanik District, Simalungun Regency in class X with 30 students. The findings show (1) students do not have sufficient listening skills, (2) problems faced by students in listening are related to with their level of concentration, the habit of speaking English, limited vocabulary, similarity in pronunciation in English and also the problem of accents, there are several distinctive accents such as British and American, and (3) to overcome these problems, the teacher applies the Community Language Learning method by asking students to make study groups, in learning to listen to English. Thus, it can be concluded that the teacher's efforts are relevant to listening problems faced by students

Improving Loanword Identification in Low-Resource Language with Data Augmentation and Multiple Feature Fusion.

Loanword identification is studied in recent years to alleviate data sparseness in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, and so on. However, recent studies on this topic usually put efforts on high-resource languages (such as Chinese, English, and Russian); for low-resource languages, such as Uyghur and Mongolian, due to the limitation of resources and lack of annotated data, loanword identification on these languages tends to have lower performance. To overcome this problem, we first propose a lexical constraint-based data augmentation method to generate training data for low-resource language loanword identification; then, a loanword identification model based on a log-linear RNN is introduced to improve the performance of low-resource loanword identification by incorporating features such as word-level embeddings, character-level embeddings, pronunciation similarity, and part-of-speech (POS) into one model. Experimental results on loanword identification in Uyghur (in this study, we mainly focus on Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Turkish loanwords in Uyghur) showed that our proposed method achieves best performance compared with several strong baseline systems.

Research on Speech Recognition Technology in English Pronunciation Similarity

Authentic English pronunciation is very important in daily communication and mutual understanding. With the improvement of automatic speech recognition technology, the computer-aided pronunciation practice (CAPT) system can already provide limited interaction for second language learners. Pronunciation similarity comparison is a key step in building a system, designing a model that recognizes the similarity of English pronunciations. By calculating the similarity between the learner’s pronunciation and the standard voice, and comparing with the expert’s score on the learner’s pronunciation, the correlation between the two is calculated to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the model.

Loanword Identification in Low-Resource Languages with Minimal Supervision

Bilingual resources play a very important role in many natural language processing tasks, especially the tasks in cross-lingual scenarios. However, it is expensive and time consuming to build such resources. Lexical borrowing happens in almost every language. This inspires us to detect these loanwords effectively, and to use the “loanword (in receipt language)”-“donor word (in donor language)” to extend the bilingual resource for NLP tasks in low-resource languages. In this article, we propose a novel method to identify loanwords in Uyghur. The most important advantage of this method is that the model only relies on large amount of monolingual corpora and only a small scale of annotated data. Our loanword identification model includes two parts: loanword candidate generation and loanword prediction. In the first part, we use two large-scale monolingual corpora and a small bilingual dictionary to train a cross-lingual embedding model. Since semantic unrelated words often cannot be treated as loanword pairs, a loanword candidate list will be generated according to this model and a word list in Uyghur. In the second part, we predict from the preceding candidates based on a log-linear model that integrates several features such as pronunciation similarity, part-of-speech tags, and hybrid language modeling. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct two types of experiments: loanword identification and OOV translation. Experimental results showed that (1) our proposed method achieved significant F1 improvements compared to other models in all four loanword identification tasks in Uyghur, and (2) after extending the existing translation models with loanword identification results, OOV rates in several language pairs reduced significantly and the translation performance improved.

A Database of Dutch-English Cognates, Interlingual Homographs and Translation Equivalents.

To investigate the structure of the bilingual mental lexicon, researchers in the field of bilingualism often use words that exist in multiple languages: cognates (which have the same meaning) and interlingual homographs (which have a different meaning). A high proportion of these studies have investigated language processing in Dutch–English bilinguals. Despite the abundance of research using such materials, few studies exist that have validated such materials. We conducted two rating experiments in which Dutch–English bilinguals rated the meaning, spelling and pronunciation similarity of pairs of Dutch and English words. On the basis of these results, we present a new database of Dutch–English identical cognates (e.g. “wolf”–“wolf”; n = 58), non-identical cognates (e.g. “kat”–“cat”; n = 74), interlingual homographs (e.g. “angel”–“angel”; n = 72) and translation equivalents (e.g. “wortel”–“carrot”; n = 78). The database can be accessed at http://osf.io/tcdxb/.

A Study of Relationship between Arabic and Yoruba Languages

This study examined the relationship between Arabic and Yoruba languages. An attempt is made to trace the history of the Yoruba as a race and the influence that Arabic language has on Yoruba language. This influence is observed in the pronunciation of some Yoruba words traceable to Arabic with the same meaning. These facts, if well proved will go a long way in lending credence to the historical belief that the Yoruba race originated from the Arab. To elucidate this, traces of Arabic words in Yoruba language are noted. Similarity in pronunciation of some letters in both languages, comparison in construction of words between them and similarity in the use of some words in both languages are analysed with the views of some Arabic scholars. Conclusion is then drawn to show the impact of Arabic on Yoruba Language.

Knowledge about urology in the general population of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Introduction:The knowledge of the general population about the medical specialties is not well studied in our community. Our aim is to explore the amount of knowledge known about urology by the general population.Materials and Methods:A questionnaire was completed by 154 respondents in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After measuring the amount of knowledge in our population, we looked forward to compare it with English as well as French speaking population in North America (NA). We translated to Arabic the same questionnaire used in their study. Two extra questions were added to further serve our aim.Results:Of the 154 respondents, 66% (102) said that they know little or nothing about urology, and 43% (66) did not know that urology involves surgery. When asked to mention three diseases within the field of urology, only 37% (57) were able to do so. Fourteen percent (21) were unable to mention even one disease. When asked about naming modalities of treatment in urology, 67% (104) were able to mention one or more. The rest were unable to mention even one modality. Most of the wrong answers were related to mixing urology with anatomically related fields rather than pronunciation similarity. Most of the results were better when compared to the studies done in NA.Conclusion:Although significant proportion of our population know little about the field of urology, the overall result is better when compared to North American population. The clarity of Arabic terminology related to the field may explain the difference.

English word associative memory through pronunciation based vocabulary network

Pronunciation associative memory is a high effective memorizing strategy.A pronunciation based vocabulary network was introduced in order to guide learners to use pronunciation associative memory,to help them to get familiar with pronunciation rules,to strengthen their memories of words as well as to assist learners to build bidirectional recognition between letter combination and its pronunciation options.This network was constructed according to frequent letter combinations and pronunciation difference between words.Therefore,it contained information about pronunciation similarity and word structure.Based on the network,learning system can realize pronunciation associative memory function,and can provide relevant statistical data.Associative memory function of word learning system can be further improved by utilizing pronunciation based vocabulary network.

On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction

Following research that found imitation in single-word shadowing, this study examines the degree to which interacting talkers increase similarity in phonetic repertoire during conversational interaction. Between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items produced in a conversational task were examined for phonetic convergence by asking a separate set of listeners to detect similarity in pronunciation across items in a perceptual task. In general, a listener judged a repeated item spoken by one talker in the task to be more similar to a sample production spoken by the talker's partner than corresponding pre- and postinteraction utterances. Both the role of a participant in the task and the sex of the pair of talkers affected the degree of convergence. These results suggest that talkers in conversational settings are susceptible to phonetic convergence, which can mark nonlinguistic functions in social discourse and can form the basis for phenomena such as accent change and dialect formation.

정보통신 단말기를 위한 한글 모음 입력 시스템

There is a limitation of using a small number of input buttons for writing Hangul words on hand-held devices. As a quick and convenient way of implementing Hangul vowels by small number of buttons, we propose a vowel input system in which vowels are fabricated from eight vowels. Our input system supports a fast input speed by making all the diphthong from one or two strokes. It also adopts a multiple input method for diphthong that users can make a diphthong in a user-friendly way of vowel writing formation or pronunciation similarity. Furthermore, we added an error correction functionality for the similar vowels that are caused by vowel harmony rules. When the proposed method is compared to the previous ones, our method outperformed in the input speed and error correction.