Suprasegmental Aspects Research Articles

Linguistic correlates of second language users’ attitudes to Arabic and Chinese varieties of English: a verbal guise study

ABSTRACT Research into language attitudes suggests that L2 users often hold negative attitudes toward their own and others’ L2 accents. However, less is known about specific features that affect these attitudes. Beinhoff’s study explored consonantal variation and its impact on perceptions of L2 speakers, but this study further examines linguistic correlates of L2 users’ attitudes toward Arabic and Chinese varieties of English. Using the verbal guise method, Arabic and Chinese male and female speakers read a paragraph in English with varying L1 influences. Each sample was rated by 30 L2 listeners on a 6-point semantic differential scale assessing status, solidarity, and dynamism. Phonological and fluency analyses of the samples revealed that non-segmental features, such as prosody, play a more significant role in eliciting positive attitudes toward these English varieties than do segmental features. These findings highlight the importance of suprasegmental aspects in shaping listener perceptions of L2 English speech.

Audiovisual Perception of Lexical Stress: Beat Gestures and Articulatory Cues.

Human communication is inherently multimodal. Auditory speech, but also visual cues can be used to understand another talker. Most studies of audiovisual speech perception have focused on the perception of speech segments (i.e., speech sounds). However, less is known about the influence of visual information on the perception of suprasegmental aspects of speech like lexical stress. In two experiments, we investigated the influence of different visual cues (e.g., facial articulatory cues and beat gestures) on the audiovisual perception of lexical stress. We presented auditory lexical stress continua of disyllabic Dutch stress pairs together with videos of a speaker producing stress on the first or second syllable (e.g., articulating VOORnaam or voorNAAM). Moreover, we combined and fully crossed the face of the speaker producing lexical stress on either syllable with a gesturing body producing a beat gesture on either the first or second syllable. Results showed that people successfully used visual articulatory cues to stress in muted videos. However, in audiovisual conditions, we were not able to find an effect of visual articulatory cues. In contrast, we found that the temporal alignment of beat gestures with speech robustly influenced participants' perception of lexical stress. These results highlight the importance of considering suprasegmental aspects of language in multimodal contexts.

The Lombard effect in children with cochlear implants: suprasegmental aspects

ABSTRACT Children with cochlear implants (CI) communicate in noisy environments, such as in classrooms, where multiple talkers and reverberation are present. Speakers compensate for noise via the ‘Lombard effect’. The present study examined the Lombard effect on the intensity and duration of stressed vowels in the speech of children with Cochlear Implants (CIs) as compared to children with Normal Hearing (NH), focusing on the effects of speech-shaped noise (SSN) and speech-shaped noise with reverberation (SSN+Reverberation). The sample consisted of 7 children with CIs and 7 children with NH, aged 7–12 years. Regarding intensity, a) children with CIs produced stressed vowels with an overall greater intensity across acoustic conditions as compared to NH peers, b) both groups increased their stressed vowel intensity for all vowels from Quiet to both noise conditions, and c) children with NH further increased their intensity when reverberation was added to SSN, esp. for the vowel /u/. Regarding duration, longer stressed vowels were produced by children with CIs as compared to NH in Quiet and SSN conditions but the effect was retained only for the vowels /i/, /o/ and /u/ when reverberation was added to noise. The SSN+Reverberation condition induced systematic lengthening in stressed vowels for children with NH. Furthermore, although greater intensity and duration ratios of stressed/unstressed syllables were observed for children with NH as compared to CIs in Quiet condition, they diminished with noise. The differences observed across groups have implications for speaking in classroom noise.

Decoding the Suprasegmental Aspect: A Deep Dive into Word Stress Errors in English Pronunciation

In pronunciation, students encounter significant challenges when it comes to stress. The majority of students often struggle with the accurate placement of stress in words. This research project seeks to identify the key aspects: the specific word categories that pose the most significant difficulty for students regarding stress placement, the syllable position where students commonly struggle with pronunciation, and the predominant types of errors made when attempting to pronounce stress in English. This research takes a quantitative descriptive approach to gather information about these three aspects. The study's target population consists of 250 students from Tadulako University, with a sample of 35 students chosen through purposive sampling. Data collection was carried out through tests and mobile phones as research instruments, and the data were subsequently analyzed using basic statistical methods within the Excel application. The findings reveal that verbs are the most challenging for students to pronounce among various word categories, with 53 errors observed. Regarding syllable position, the ultimate position is the most difficult for students regarding placing stress on pronunciation, with 20 errors recorded. In line with the linguistic category, the error was identified in verb (48%), noun (25 %), and adjective (27%) errors produced by students.

The combination of accent method and phonemic contrast: an innovative strategy to improve speech production on post-stroke dysarthria.

Speech production includes segmental and suprasegmental features, which interact and cooperate with each other. Impaired speech production is common in individuals with post-stroke dysarthria. The commonly used phonemic contrast therapy and Accent Method in clinical practice can improve the segmental and suprasegmental aspects, respectively. This study aimed to explore the feasibility and immediate effectiveness of the combination of specific rhythm patterns of the Accent Method and phonemic contrast on speech production. Fifteen poststroke dysarthria patients (12 males and three females) first received accentuation task of three rhythm patterns (Largo-slow, Andante-medium, Allegro-fast) and later received speech task in appropriate rhythm patterns combined with phonemic contrast materials and non-phonemic contrast materials. Speech parameters were analyzed by considering speech clarity and prosody. The results showed that the number of correct target syllables, sentence clarity, and standard deviation of intensity increased significantly, and the average length of pauses and abnormal pause times decreased significantly in Andante (medium) compared to other rhythms. The number of correct target syllables, sentence clarity, and standard deviation of intensity increased significantly compared with those in the non-phonemic contrast in Andante (medium). The combination of phonemic contrast and Accent Method was verified to have an immediate effect on speech production in Mandarin speakers with post-stroke dysarthria and could be further validated in other diseases with impaired speech production in the clinic in the future.

The efficacy of the type of instruction on second language pronunciation acquisition

This study investigates the efficacy of the type of instruction (i.e., perception-based vs. production-based) on second language (L2) pronunciation acquisition in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. To achieve this objective, 60 tertiary-level Jordanian learners of English were recruited and put into two groups (30 learners in each group). Group A received 6 weeks of perception-based instruction on both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of English pronunciation, and Group B received production-based instruction over the same period and on the same aspects of pronunciation. Progress in L2 pronunciation was assessed at three time points (i.e., week 1, week 6, and week 14). Pre-, post- and delayed post-tests were run to achieve the study’s objective. A statistical analysis was conducted to analyse the data. The results show that both groups demonstrated a significant improvement in L2 pronunciation accuracy; in particular, Group A which received perception-based instruction demonstrated higher gains in segmental, syllabic, and prosodic aspects while Group B which received production-based instruction demonstrated more improvement in both global (i.e., comprehensibility) and temporal (i.e., fluency) aspects of pronunciation. However, both groups demonstrated similar gains on the delayed post-test. The findings provide implications for L2 pronunciation learners and teachers on the impact of the type of instruction on the addressed aspects of pronunciation.

A Study on English Phonetic Acquisition from the Perspective of Transfer Theory

English, as an international lingual Franca, has become one of the most widely-used languages in the world. Mastering English doesn't just mean getting information from all over the world; it also means communicating and expressing yourself with people from different cultural backgrounds. So far, EFL has received much attention in many counties. As an indispensable part of language acquisition, pronunciation learning should be valued at the beginning of foreign language study, for example, the kindergarten stage. This paper aims to illustrate the negative transfer of the mother tongue on English pronunciation acquisition from the segmental and suprasegmental aspects. Based on the studies and analysis, it hopes to inspire teachers to arouse awareness of the differences between English and Chinese pronunciation among learners, making students acquire native-like pronunciation actively and positively. It’s suggested that EFL learners can their pronunciation and intonation through practice.

Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke

The mature human brain is lateralized for language, with the left hemisphere (LH) primarily responsible for sentence processing and the right hemisphere (RH) primarily responsible for processing suprasegmental aspects of language such as vocal emotion. However, it has long been hypothesized that in early life there is plasticity for language, allowing young children to acquire language in other cortical regions when LH areas are damaged. If true, what are the constraints on functional reorganization? Which areas of the brain can acquire language, and what happens to the functions these regions ordinarily perform? We address these questions by examining long-term outcomes in adolescents and young adults who, as infants, had a perinatal arterial ischemic stroke to the LH areas ordinarily subserving sentence processing. We compared them with their healthy age-matched siblings. All participants were tested on a battery of behavioral and functional imaging tasks. While stroke participants were impaired in some nonlinguistic cognitive abilities, their processing of sentences and of vocal emotion was normal and equal to that of their healthy siblings. In almost all, these abilities have both developed in the healthy RH. Our results provide insights into the remarkable ability of the young brain to reorganize language. Reorganization is highly constrained, with sentence processing almost always in the RH frontotemporal regions homotopic to their location in the healthy brain. This activation is somewhat segregated from RH emotion processing, suggesting that the two functions perform best when each has its own neural territory.

The Suprasegmental Analysis On Jokowi’s Speech Of “Lonjakan Kasus Covid-19 dan Penerapan PPKMMikro On 23rd Of June 2021”

The Suprasegmental Analysis On Jokowi’s Speech Of “Lonjakan Kasus Covid-19 dan Penerapan PPKMMikro On 23rd Of June 2021”

Teaching English Pronunciation During The Covid Pandemic

It is often pointed out that pronunciation instruction, unlike many other aspects of language learning, is a very physical activity. In teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language, face-to-face tuition with an experienced, phonetically trained instructor remains the best option. But the COVID pandemic and the shift to online teaching which universities in Bulgaria had to make virtually overnight about two years ago, forced course instructors to adapt very quickly both their teaching materials and resources as well as their teaching methods and practices to the new realities of life in / with the epidemic. The present paper addresses the question of teaching English pronunciation at tertiary level during the COVID pandemic. It discusses briefly the advantages and disadvantages of a number of digital resources which university students have found useful both in class and for individual work outside the virtual classroom on various segmental and suprasegmental aspects of the pronunciation of the foreign language.

Stress and vowel reduction by Korean Learners of English

Having a foreign accent is unavoidable for late second or foreign language learners. The reason is that physical changes in the brain influence learning a variety of aspects in a new language system (Flege, 1987; Patkowski, 1990). In other words, a well-established first language mediates the acquisition of a second language. The mediation can be called cross-linguistics influence or negative transfer (Sharwood Smith and Kellerma, 1986). In terms of suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, vowel reduction occurring in stress-timed languages such as English but lacking in syllable-timed languages is noteworthy to understand the cause of nonnative accents. The present work aims to explore patterns of vowel reduction in Korean accented English, with the goal of finding pronunciation issues in the English of Korean learners that might be due to transfer effects from an acoustic-phonetic standpoint. English speech samples from native English and Korean speakers of the Wildcat Corpus were used for data analysis. The vowel qualities, the duration ratios, and formant values of unstressed vowels produced by Korean and English speakers were analyzed. Results show that the Korean speakers tend not to reduce English unstressed vowels, assimilate them into similar vowels in their vowel inventory, and produce them as full vowels.

A contrastive analysis of Korean-Indonesian phonological structures

This paper discusses the contrastive analysis of Korean-Indonesian phonological structure. The contrastive analysis here covers phonological correspondence and phonotactic structure between Korean and Indonesian. It also provides implications to pronunciation learning, especially Korean language learners in Indonesia. This paper is a descriptive qualitative research, using literature study from books, journals, and other related resources. This study revealed that Korean had more monophthongs and diphthongs than Indonesian, with Correspondence between Indonesian’s ‘ə’ and Korean’s ‘ɨ’, Korean’s ‘ə (ㅓ), o (ㅗ)’ and Indonesian’s ‘o’, and Korean’s ‘e (ㅔ), ɜ (ㅐ)’ and Indonesian’s ‘e’. However, Korean and Indonesian had different classification of consonant’s manner of articulation, especially on correspondence between voicing and affricative markedness. On syllable structure, Korean was considered to have stricter syllable structure than Indonesian, as seen on constraint applied on syllable. These findings will help instructor create more effective pronunciation learning, with a comprehensive syllabus in using phonological theory and language skills. However, the suprasegmental aspect and phonological process are excluded from this research.

EFL Students’ Pronunciation Problems in Presenting Thesis Proposal at Tertiary Level of English Department

The aim of the research is to investigate EFL Students’ Pronunciation Problems in Presenting Thesis Proposal at Tertiary Level of English Department. This qualitative study reported in this article focused on segmental features problems. The instruments used to collect the data needed in this study were the researcher, recording, and Dictionary. The data analysis covered consonant and vowel pronunciation problems. was based on the theories of phonetics proposed by George Yule and Jacobs, which embraces voicing, manner of articulation and place of articulation for English consonant production and the tongue part and position, sound length, and mouth forming for English vowel production. The result of the study shows that the research subject encountered a number of segmental pronunciation problems consisting of consonants and vowels including pure vowels and diphthongs. Furthermore, this research revealed that the problem with consonant sounds were the substitution of the sounds [v], [ð], [θ], [t∫], [ʒ], [ʃ] [z] and the deletion of the sounds [k], [ɡ], [t], and [s]. The problem with pure vowel sounds were the substitution of the sound [ɪ], [iː], [ɛ], [ʊ], [ʌ], [ɜː], [ɒ], [ɔː] and [ə] and the insertion of the sound [ə] between two consonant sounds. The problem with diphthongs were: the monophthongization of the sound [aɪ], [aʊ], [eɪ], [ɪə], [əʊ], and the replacement of the sounds [eɪ] and [ɪə] with other diphthongs. It is suggested for the next researchers to investigate pronunciation problems related to supra-segmental aspects and phonemic opposition. and factors driving pronunciation problems in the EFL Classroom setting.

JAVANESE PHONOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE IN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH LITERATURE DEPARTMENT STUDENTS

The occurrence of phonological interference can be found if the native is able to acquire multilingually. The research aims to reveal the phonological aspects causing phonological interference and establish the strategies for avoiding interference. Students of the English literature department that take English Language Teaching (ELT) and speak Javanese, Indonesia, and English language become the primary sources of this research. The method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative as research design and the theory of Geoffry S. Nathan for the analysis. Meanwhile, Marsono’s theory is employed to compare it with vocal, diphthong, and consonant in Javanese language. The finding shows that phonological interference comes from a segmental aspect, totaling errors up to 99 and 189 in the suprasegmental aspect. In the segmental aspect, errors of English pronunciation were found on the assimilation of speech implementation based on vowel, diphthong, and consonant. Meanwhile, in the suprasegmental aspect, word stress on the second syllable with two, three, and four-syllable words become the most errors. Therefore, phonological interference can be avoided by doing more individual practice in looking for difficult vocabularies and using English as the main language in doing enjoyable activities such as listening to music and watching movies.

Effects of attention to segmental vs. suprasegmental features on the speech intelligibility and comprehensibility of the EFL learners targeting the perception or production-focused practice

The present study investigated the training benefits of segmental vs. suprasegmental aspects for the intelligibility and comprehensibility of spoken English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Five groups of lower intermediate EFL learners were formed by random assignment. A pretest of the speaking skills, intelligibility, and comprehensibility of the learners’ speech confirmed that the five groups were homogeneous before starting the training program. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks in English, and discussed their contents, watched authentic English movies, and did exercises to improve speaking skills without receiving explicit segmental and suprasegmental explanations and exercises. The experimental groups received an explanation of segmental or suprasegmental features (during one-sixth of the teaching time) followed by production-focused or perception-focused practice (during another one-sixth of the teaching time). The total instruction time was the same for all five groups, i.e., 15 h. Students then took a posttest in speaking skills targeting their speech intelligibility and comprehensibility. The findings revealed that the speech intelligibility of learners who received segmental training followed by production-focused practice was better than that of all other groups. Learners who received suprasegmental instruction followed by production-focused practice outperformed all other groups in terms of comprehensibility.

Prosodic event detection in children’s read speech

Prosody is the supra-segmental aspect of speech that helps to convey the structure and intended meaning of lexical content unambiguously. The automatic detection of prosodic events, such as phrase boundary and word prominence, has a number of applications in discourse analysis, where a combination of syntactic and acoustic-prosodic features is typically employed. This work addresses prosodic event detection in the context of assessing oral reading skills of middle-school children. We discuss the observed characteristics of a specially created labeled data set of oral reading recordings of English stories by non-native speakers. The obtained diversity of language skills adds to the known challenges of high speaker variability in the acoustic realization of prosodic events. A combination of knowledge- and data-driven feature selection is implemented to identify a compact set of word-level features from the acoustic correlates of prosody considering different ways of incorporating the necessary temporal context. The system is benchmarked with reference to a widely known prosodic event recognition system in a speaker-independent set-up to obtain a competitive performance with greatly reduced feature dimensionality. The interpretable features enable us to use the predictor model importance scores to identify high-level speaker traits that influence the acoustic realization of prosodic events, suggesting a potential extension to systems that can extract and utilize speaker idiosyncrasies for superior prosodic event detection.

Footing e TRP - A arquitetura informal do C-ORAL-Brasil I sob uma ótica socio(inter)acional

Este artigo contempla o aspecto dinâmico que orienta e organiza as relações interpessoais em eventos microecológicos que Goffman (1979) chamou de footing e considera, também, o momento exato da alternância de turno que linguistas como Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson (1974; 2003), Marcuschi (2003) e Couper-Kuhlen e Selting (2018) chamam de TRP (Lugar de Relevância para a Transição). O objetivo é verificar em dois arquivos de fala espontânea do C-ORAL-BRASIL I, “bfamcv02” e “bfamcv05”, se o TRP das TCUs (Unidades de Construção de Turno) constituídas nas falas em interação provoca mudanças de footing. Para alcançar este objetivo, elaborou-se uma interface entre a prosódia, Hirst e Di Cristo (1998), Bolinger (1986), Halliday (1967), Robert D. Ladd (2008 [1996]), Gumperz (1988) e Selting, (1995), e as perspectivas teóricas que melhor explicam a estruturação de uma interação falada: a Análise da Conversa, a Linguística Interacional e a Sociolinguística Interacional, Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson (1974; 2003), Marcuschi (1988; 2003; 2008), Couper-Kuhlen e Selting (2018), Goffman (1972; 1974; 1798; 1981), Gumperz (1982; 1989) e Tannen e Wallat (1987). As análises foram realizadas, portanto, a partir de aspectos sociointeracionais e suprassegmentais e os resultados apontaram que o TRP verificado nas TCUs elaboradas nas duas situações comunicativas escolhidas para este artigo provoca mudanças de footing.

Suprasegmental Features of Indonesian Students’ English Pronunciation and the Pedagogical Implication


 This minor study aims at describing learners’ features of pronunciation in terms of their suprasegmental aspects found in their speech. Students were asked to read aloud a text entitled The Gorilla Joke from the © BBC British Council 2006. Students oral narrations were then analysed in terms of their intonation pattern and stress assignment in sentence level. A metrical analysis was also used to show how students produced their speech rhythm. The result of the analysis shows that given the same text to read students may produce various combination of intonation patterns. Students also misplaced stress within the syllables or assigned no stress at all. Based on the metrical phonology analysis, learners did not assign foot timely based on the timing units in connected speeches. The speech production is more like a broken speech. Students also neglected the morphophonemics rules in which they did not produce the appropriate allomorphs [t], [d], and [id] in the past participle words. These features bring about some pedagogical implication. 
 Keywords: student’ pronunciation features, suprasegmental aspects

The differential contribution of segmental and suprasegmental aspects of a foreign English accent to negative perceptions by native and non-native speakers

Foreign accents are often stereotyped as a “broken” form of the language, triggering negative reactions in native listeners—a phenomenon attributed to a general reduction in cognitive fluency. This study aims to determine the relative contributions of segmental and suprasegmental features to the perception of foreign-accented speech. Sentences in English were recorded by native speakers of Russian, Italian, and English (the latter as a control group). The recordings were manipulated to form 3 sets: naturally produced, intonation only (i.e., filtered in Praat with a low-pass Hann filter), and segmental only (i.e., foreign pronunciation was preserved in terms of consonants and vowels, but the intonation resembled that of English). Each utterance was presented to native (n = 26) and non-native English speakers (n = 32) residing in NYC and rated on several dimensions on a 1-5 Likert scale. The results support previous findings, indicating that foreign accents cause speakers to be perceived more negatively even in strongly multicultural environments. We discuss the effects of segmental/suprasegmental information in native and non-native perception and a number of language-specific patterns. This study adds to the body of work on the mechanisms underlying listeners' reactions to foreign-accented speech.

Focus on teaching pronunciation at primary schools in Slovakia

Teaching and practicing correct pronunciation is often neglected in English language lessons. The importance of correct pronunciation is unquestionable as it is a fundamental feature of successful communication. For this reason, it needs to be taught and practiced right from the beginning of English language teaching, because young learners are the best recipients and often can achieve flawless-like pronunciation. This qualitative study investigates how teachers perceive teaching pronunciation at several primary schools in Slovakia, focusing on teaching techniques and materials used for teaching pronunciation, and aspects of pronunciation. Methods for collecting research data were observation and interview. Findings show that the most used teaching techniques are corrections, drills and songs, and that the most used materials are pictures and textbook CDs. Segmental aspects were practiced when learning new words, but without any particular attention to segmenatal features and suprasegmental aspects of rhythm were practiced by rhymes, chants and songs and no attention was paid to word stress. The study indicates that teachers pay attention to teaching pronunciation, but without particular focus on different features of pronunciaton and using limited teaching techniques and materials.