Profiles Of Speakers Research Articles

An Examination of the Metacognitive Reading Strategies Used by Native Speakers of Arabic When Reading in English and Arabic

This study examined the metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension strategies used by advanced proficiency ESL readers whose native language is Arabic. The study looked at the perceived use of reading strategies by Arabic native speakers in Arabic and English and their actual use of these strategies in reading academic texts in the two languages. The goal was to compare the reading strategy profiles of Arabic native speakers in English and Arabic through quantitative means using a self-report survey of strategy use (n=90), and qualitative means using a think-aloud protocol with a subset of the original sample (n=10). The topic and research questions are pertinent because they add to a relatively small database showing Arabic native speakers rely heavily on reading strategies in their L2 than when reading in their L1.

The aquisition of sonorant voicing.

In the view of Exemplar Theory phonetic variants of words are stored by speakers in their memory as a set of exemplars organized into clusters and grow stronger or decay over time depending on language experience (Bybee, 2002). In Polish and French sonorant consonants in clusters are devoiced word finally, which does not occur in German and English because of phonotactical constraints. A study based on automatic speech alignment and voicing profile extraction from Polish, French, German, and English speech corpuses aims at defining voicing sonorant temporal structure and voicing profile acquisition. The hypothesis is that Polish and French native speakers transfer their L1 exemplars during L2 acquisition of English and German and thus devoice sonorant. After extracting voicing profiles from recordings of native Polish and French speakers speaking English and German as an L2/L3, comparison of voicing profiles of English and German native speakers will be made in order to define the exemplar transfer.

Between Exclamatives and Interrogatives in Li Jing Ji

This paper explores the similarities and differences between exclamatives and interrogatives in terms of scalar modal. In this modal, they both denote a set of propositions which are organized into a scale according to at least one parameter. But in exclamatives the speaker profiles a proposition which is located towards an extreme end of the scale while in interrogatives the speaker asks the hearer to pick out a proposition from a presupposed set of propositions. The conceptual metaphor “Thinking Is Moving In The Ideascape” is used to provide a cognitive evidence for our approach. Finally, a preliminary study of two types of exclamatives which are marked with wh-words 乜 mih8 or deictic terms 拙 chua3, 障 chionn3, 向 hionn3 in Li Jing Ji is given.

Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?

The assumption that age will show a correlation with proficiency in the verbal performance of receding-language speakers often has a general validity where group profiles are considered, but exceptions on the individual level can be striking. Individual speaker profiles offered by Aikhenvald for a contemporary Tariana-speaking community and by Bloomfield for the Menomini-speaking community of his time are reviewed in this light and compared with several speaker profiles representing a contracting Gaelic-speaking community in Scotland. Community evaluations of speakers' abilities are shown to reflect local conceptions of speaking well and do not always accord with linguists' assessment of speaker skills. Linguists may need to be more cautious when attaching importance to the role of age as a correlate of proficiency.

Speaker Profiling Persons with Communication Disorders

Speaker Profiling Persons with Communication Disorders

Invited International Speaker Profiles

Invited International Speaker Profiles

An Experimental Syntactic Study of Binding of Multiple Anaphors in Korean

In this paper we investigated the binding behavior of three Korean reflexives-caki, casin, and caki-casin-through a Truth Value Judgment Task with pictures and found that while caki and caki-casin pattern as claimed in the theoretical literature, as a long-distance and a local anaphor respectively, native Korean speakers differ in how they treat casin. While the speakers as a group treat casin as an LDA, individual results revealed a bimodal distribution, with one group of speakers consistently treating casin as an LDA and another, smaller, group consistently treating it as a local anaphor. This distribution is puzzling in that the grammar of speakers who treat casin as a strictly local anaphor appears to violate the cross-linguistic generalization that morphologically simple reflexives are long-distance anaphors. We show that this problem is only apparent, since the bare form casin lends itself to two different structural analyses. In addition, we show that the greater percentage of speakers who treat casin as an LDA reflects an ongoing change in the grammar of Korean, where casin is both increasing in frequency and taking on more long distance antecedents. This assessment is supported by the sociolinguistic profiles of speakers we tested as well as the frequency and distribution of casin in Bible translations.

Comparison of accent features embedded in Chattisgarhi and Khariboli Dialect of Hindi for Forensic Speaker Profiling

Comparison of accent features embedded in Chattisgarhi and Khariboli Dialect of Hindi for Forensic Speaker Profiling

Reaching the end point and stopping midway: different scenarios in the acquisition of Russian

This is a survey article that brings together some more familiar patterns in the acquisition of Russian (by monolingual speakers) and lesser known ones, reflecting the acquisition and maintenance of Russian in the context of another dominant language ‐ in this case, American English. Assuming a critical distinction between two types of acquisition, the acquisition of language that results in complete, full native speaker competency (regardless of whether a particular speaker represents the standard, educated, variety of L1, or any other of its varieties), and the acquisition interrupted, in childhood, by the switch to another language as dominant, the former will be referred to as uninterrupted acquisition, the latter as incomplete acquisition. Of these two, uninterrupted acquisition is the one that is standardly pursued and discussed in L1 acquisition studies. Incomplete acquisition, which results in the linguistic profile of a heritage speaker, has gone mostly unnoticed, for a number of reasons. To name just a few: heritage speakers often have passive language skills only, which makes it hard to assess their language competence. Heritage speakers are often mistaken for unbalanced bilinguals, and as such considered desirable subjects for bilingualism research. Lumped together with other types of language attrition and loss, the language of heritage speakers has chiefly been the province of sociolinguistic studies, and it is often hard to make two separate subfields within linguistics talk to one another. In the meantime, heritage speakers may well be an important missing piece that would enrich the picture of L1 acquisition that we are trying to create.

Fluency variation in adolescents

The Speech Fluency Profile of fluent adolescent speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were examined with respect to gender and neurolinguistic variations. Speech samples of 130 male and female adolescents, aged between 12;0 and 17;11 years were gathered. They were analysed according to type of speech disruption; speech rate; and frequency of speech disruptions. Statistical analysis did not find significant differences between genders for the variables studied. However, regarding the phases of adolescence (early: 12;0–14;11 years; late: 15;0–17;11 years), statistical differences were observed for all of the variables. As for neurolinguistic maturation, a decrease in the number of speech disruptions and an increase in speech rate occurred during the final phase of adolescence, indicating that the maturation of the motor and linguistic processes exerted an influence over the fluency profile of speech.

Rersonal Profiles of Invited Speakers

Rersonal Profiles of Invited Speakers

Difference or Deficit in Speakers of African American English?

Difference or Deficit in Speakers of African American English?

Effects of voice disguise on speaking fundamental frequency

Patterns of voice disguise in forensic cases involving speaker identification or speaker profiling may contain clues to features of the undisguised voice of a speaker. In a longitudinal and synchronous study, 100 subjects were asked to read a text on five occasions during a period of six months, first using their normal voices, and subsequently with two out of three modes of voice disguise, (1) raising fundamental frequency, (2) lowering fundamental frequency, (3) denasalization by firmly pinching theirnose. The focus of this investigation is on fundamental frequency (F0). Results show that most subjects were in fact able consistently to change their F0 according to the mode of disguise they had selected. However, there were differences between both sexes with regard to their preference of disguise modes as well as to the individual articulatory ‘strategies’ which they employed to implement them. Results corroborate experience with forensic casework, that is, they show that there is a constant relation between the F0 of a speaker’s natural speech behaviour and the kind of disguise he willuse in an incriminating phone call. Speakers with higher-than-average F0 tend to increase their F0 levels. This process may or may not involve register changes from modal voice to falsetto. Speakers with lower-than-average F0 prefer to disguise their voices by lowering F0 even more and often end up with permanently creaky voice. Thelatter trend can be observed much more clearly in males. Females are generally more reluctant to make drastic changes to their fundamental frequency patterns.

Single word intelligibility in aphasia and apraxia of speech: A phonetic error analysis

This study examined the phonetic differences between word productions attempted by aphasic speakers and listeners perceptions of these productions. Ten speakers with aphasia and apraxia of speech, ten with aphasia only and ten normal speakers produced 70 monosyllabic words. Listeners orthographically transcribed the words they thought the speakers were saying. The target and transcribed words were compared and phonetic differences noted. There was no significant difference in the frequency of target-transcription discrepancies between vowels and consonants or between consonants in prevocalic and postvocalic position for any of the speaker groups. In addition to a greater number of errors, the phonetic error profiles of aphasic speakers with and without apraxia of speech were different from that of normal speakers. Among apraxic speakers, different error patterns were found in speakers with high overall intelligibility than in speakers with low to moderate overall intelligibility. The frequency of errors affecting place of articulation for stops and nasals was highly correlated with overall speech intelligibility. Other common phonetic confusions for the apraxic speakers included confusions between singleton and consonant clusters, and between presence and absence of word initial /h/. There was substantial individual variability across apraxic speakers for several other phonetic contrasts.

The construction of an ”outsider’s” voice by low-proficiency speakers of an Albanian variety (Arvanítika) in Greece: language and ideology

Arvanitika spoken in Greece, a variety ofTosk Albanian, nowfaces attrition. The sociolinguistic profile of Greek-Arvanitika Speakers reveals the emergence of a group of Iow-proficiency Speakers of the language. These lowproficiency, or terminal, Speakers, despite reduced linguistic competence in the threatened language, manipulate various discursive-generic conventions in order to express their linguistic ideology. As a social group caught in the middle of contradictions, Iow-proficiency Speakers have to maintain good relations with both the local Community and the wider matrix society. As a result, they construct an outsider's voice that satisfies the requirements imposedon them by their precarious sociolinguistic condition. Recent work in the study of leaky boundaries and language and ideology provides helpful methodological and theoretical tools for the investigation of language-shift-related phenomena.

Evaluating LPC‐coder performance using voice quality analysis

A system for characterizing individual voice quality has been developed and used successfully to describe normal voice, pathological voice, and paralinguistic affect. In this study, voice quality analysis is used to evaluate the distortion introduced by LPC‐based speech coding. Vocal profiles of speakers are obtained by having trained judges rate the extent to which 21 phonetically based features deviate from the “neutral” setting. Profiles for original and coded material from the same speaker are compared and a distortion measure is derived that quantifies the change in voice quality attributable to the coder. Results indicate that voice quality analysis is sensitive to many characteristics of LPC types of source coding, quantization of spectral parameters, and pole frequency and bandwidth accuracy.

HLA-A,B,C and DR antigens in Asaro speakers of Papua New Guinea

The HLA profile of the Asaro speakers of Papua New Guinea exhibits restricted polymorphisms. Antigens like AW24, MT1, and MB1 were present in almost every individual assayed. A CW6-related antigen and a DR locus antigen FT19 (a split of DRW6), not previously found in Pacific populations, were observed in a significant number of individuals. Ancestral HLA-B,C haplotypic combinations, such as B13, CW4 and BW60, CW3, were frequently found. Preliminary evidence is provided for an association between BW62 and CW6 in this population. The observed distributions of multiple-locus heterozygosities are similar to those expected under the null hypothesis of linkage equilibrium. The results indicate that the Asaro, among other highland populations, have been isolated long enough for pre-existing linkage disequilibria at recombinational distances of 0.8% or more (such as occur with HLA-A,B and HLA-B,DR haplotypes) to have broken down.

Characteristics of the three-person conversation

Three Ss were assigned a task of conversing about a number of stimulus words, for one half hour per stimulus word. The conversations were tape-recorded and transcribed, and the words of each S in each conversation were categorized according to a preestablished system which permits one or two content categories to each word. Profiles of content for each speaker in each conversation were then constructed, and correlated with each other. It was found that content profiles of separate speakers within the same conversation were most highly correlated of all the profiles. Next highest correlations were between speakers in separate conversations where the separate conversations were about stimulus words judged to be psychologically similar. Lowest correlations were between speakers in separate conversations where the stimulus words were judged to be psychologically unrelated. The study did not reveal significant individual differences in predilection for content across all conversations. This suggests that topic of conversation and social conformity override individual differences in content.