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The effect of manipulation of a speaker’s voice as well as exposure to a native speaker’s utterance was investigated regarding the pronunciation of stops by German learners of French. Three subject groups, a Control (CG), a Manipulation (MG), and a Native Speaker (NG) Group, were recorded on two subsequent days. The MG was presented with a manipulation of their voice on the second day and the NG listened to a native French speaker, while the CG did not receive any feedback. Results show that speakers of the MG and NG were able to extract useful information from the respective feedback and successfully adapted to it. Participants were able to reduce their voice onset time values, although speakers of the NG reduced it to a greater extent.
Prominence has been widely studied on the word level and the syllable level. An extensive study comparing the two approaches is missing in the literature. This study investigates how word and syllable prominence relate to each other in German. We find that perceptual ratings based on the word level are more extreme than those based on the syllable level. The correlations between word prominence and acoustic features are greater than the correlations between syllable prominence and acoustic features.
This study examines the pitch profiles of French learners of German and German learners of French, both in their native language (L1), and in their respective foreign language (L2). Results of the analysis of 84 speakers suggest that for short read sentences, French and German speakers do not show pitch range differences in their native production. Furthermore, analyses of mean f0 and pitch range indicate that range is not necessarily reduced in L2 productions. These results are different from results reported in prior research. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed.
This study presents the results of a large-scale comparison of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two Slavic (Bulgarian and Polish) and two Germanic (German and British English) languages. The productions of twenty-two speakers per language (eleven male and eleven female) in two different tasks (read passages and number sets) are compared. Significant differences between the language groups are found: German and English speakers use lower pitch maxima, narrower pitch span, and generally less variable pitch than Bulgarian and Polish speakers. These findings support the hypothesis that inguistic communities tend to be characterized by particular pitch profiles.
Designing a Bilingual Speech Corpus for French and German Language Learners: a Two-Step Process
(2014)
We present the design of a corpus of native and non-native speech for the language pair French-German, with a special emphasis on phonetic and prosodic aspects. To our knowledge there is no suitable corpus, in terms of size and coverage, currently available for the target language pair. To select the target L1-L2 interference phenomena we prepare a small preliminary corpus (corpus1), which is analyzed for coverage and cross-checked jointly by French and German experts. Based on this analysis, target phenomena on the phonetic and phonological level are selected on the basis of the expected degree of deviation from the native performance and the frequency of occurrence. 14 speakers performed both L2 (either French or German) and L1 material (either German or French). This allowed us to test, recordings duration, recordings material, the performance of our automatic aligner software. Then, we built corpus2 taking into account what we learned about corpus1. The aims are the same but we adapted speech material to avoid too long recording sessions. 100 speakers will be recorded. The corpus (corpus1 and corpus2) will be prepared as a searchable database, available for the scientific community after completion of the project.
This study investigates cross-language differences in pitch range and variation in four languages from two language groups: English and German (Germanic) and Bulgarian and Polish (Slavic). The analysis is based on large multi-speaker corpora (48 speakers for Polish, 60 for each of the other three languages). Linear mixed models were computed that include various distributional measures of pitch level, span and variation, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. A classification experiment based on the relevant parameter measures (span, kurtosis and skewness values for pitch distributions for each speaker) succeeded in separating the language groups.
Streefkerk defines prominence as the perceptually outstanding parts in spoken language. An optimal rating scale for syllable prominence has not been found yet. This paper evaluates a 4-point, an 11-point, a 31-point, and a continuous scale for the rating of syllable prominence and gives support for scales using a higher number of levels. Priming effects found by Arnold, et al., could only be replicated using the 31-point scale.
Based on specific linguistic landmarks in the speech signal, this study investigates pitch level and pitch span differences in English, German, Bulgarian and Polish. The analysis is based on 22 speakers per language (11 males and 11 females). Linear mixed models were computed that include various linguistic measures of pitch level and span, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. Pitch level appeared to have significantly higher values for the female speakers in the Slavic than the Germanic group. The male speakers showed slightly different results, with only the Polish speakers displaying significantly higher mean values for pitch level than the German males. Overall, the results show that the Slavic speakers tend to have a wider pitch span than the German speakers. But for the linguistic measure, namely for span between the initial peaks and the non-prominent valleys, we only find the difference between Polish and German speakers. We found a flatter intonation contour in German than in Polish, Bulgarian and English male and female speakers and differences in the frequency of the landmarks between languages. Concerning “speaker liveliness” we found that the speakers from the Slavic group are significantly livelier than the speakers from the Germanic group.
We investigated the effect of high-variability training (HVT) on the production and perception of French bilabial voiced and voiceless stops by German native speakers. Stop consonants in the two languages differ with respect to several articulatory and acoustic features. German learners of French (Experiment Group) trained the perception of word-initial bilabial stops spoken by six French native speakers using identification tests, whereas subjects of a Control Group did not perform a training. Additional perception and production tests of French words including bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops in all word positions were performed to capture the impact of HVT. Subjects were found to be quite good at distinguishing voiced and voiceless stops. However, voiceless stops received lower correctness scores than voiced ones and subjects of the Experiment group were able to further increase their scores after training. Results for production are mirror-inverted showing that subjects of the Experiment Group successfully produced longer negative VOT values but did not show an improvement for voiceless stops.