•The proposed sentence stress feedback system consists of stress prediction, detection and feedback provision models.•The accuracy of the stress prediction and detection models was 96.6% and 84.1% ...respectively.•The stress feedback provision model provides non-native learners with sentence stress errors.•Any sentence can be used for practice in the proposed system.•Students trained with this system improved their accentedness and rhythm significantly more than those in the control group.
This paper proposes a sentence stress feedback system in which sentence stress prediction, detection, and feedback provision models are combined. This system provides non-native learners with feedback on sentence stress errors so that they can improve their English rhythm and fluency in a self-study setting. The sentence stress feedback system was devised to predict and detect the sentence stress of any practice sentence. The accuracy of the prediction and detection models was 96.6% and 84.1%, respectively. The stress feedback provision model offers positive or negative stress feedback for each spoken word by comparing the probability of the predicted stress pattern with that of the detected stress pattern. In an experiment that evaluated the educational effect of the proposed system incorporated in our CALL system, significant improvements in accentedness and rhythm were seen with the students who trained with our system but not with those in the control group.
The article deals with segmental and suprasegmental boundary tools. As is known, the boundary signals of meaningful units come at the beginning or end of the word. The place of stress in the compared ...languages differs from each other, and this distinction is manifested in boundary signals. In the live speech, the time spent on the pronunciation of each syllable varies quite a bit, but the time interval spent on the pronunciation of a whole rhythmic group remains unchanged. Occurring, repeatedly stressed syllables in English at a specific time interval are considered a characteristic feature of the rhythm of this language. In other words, in the communication process, rhythmic division in this language is perceived based on temporal-dynamic contrasts between stressed and unstressed syllables. In the communication process, rhythmic division in this language is perceived based on temporal-dynamic contrasts between stressed and unstressed syllables. Research shows that in the Azerbaijani language, there is one primary stress in the attributive word combinations, which falls on the first component of the word combinations. In this case, the stress in those combinations has a unifying character and forms a rhythmic group. Since English belongs to the group of analytic languages, words in this language undergo very little change within the text. Thus, intra-textual syntactic relations are realized in English, not using suffixes but prepositions.
OBJECTIVES:A major issue in the rehabilitation of children with cochlear implants (CIs) is unexplained variance in their language skills, where many of them lag behind children with normal hearing ...(NH). Here, we assess links between generative language skills and the perception of prosodic stress, and with musical and parental activities in children with CIs and NH. Understanding these links is expected to guide future research and toward supporting language development in children with a CI.
DESIGN:Twenty-one unilaterally and early-implanted children and 31 children with NH, aged 5 to 13, were classified as musically active or nonactive by a questionnaire recording regularity of musical activities, in particular singing, and reading and other activities shared with parents. Perception of word and sentence stress, performance in word finding, verbal intelligence (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) vocabulary), and phonological awareness (production of rhymes) were measured in all children. Comparisons between children with a CI and NH were made against a subset of 21 of the children with NH who were matched to children with CIs by age, gender, socioeconomic background, and musical activity. Regression analyses, run separately for children with CIs and NH, assessed how much variance in each language task was shared with each of prosodic perception, the child’s own music activity, and activities with parents, including singing and reading. All statistical analyses were conducted both with and without control for age and maternal education.
RESULTS:Musically active children with CIs performed similarly to NH controls in all language tasks, while those who were not musically active performed more poorly. Only musically nonactive children with CIs made more phonological and semantic errors in word finding than NH controls, and word finding correlated with other language skills. Regression analysis results for word finding and VIQ were similar for children with CIs and NH. These language skills shared considerable variance with the perception of prosodic stress and musical activities. When age and maternal education were controlled for, strong links remained between perception of prosodic stress and VIQ (shared varianceCI, 32%/NH, 16%) and between musical activities and word finding (shared varianceCI, 53%/NH, 20%). Links were always stronger for children with CIs, for whom better phonological awareness was also linked to improved stress perception and more musical activity, and parental activities altogether shared significantly variance with word finding and VIQ.
CONCLUSIONS:For children with CIs and NH, better perception of prosodic stress and musical activities with singing are associated with improved generative language skills. In addition, for children with CIs, parental singing has a stronger positive association to word finding and VIQ than parental reading. These results cannot address causality, but they suggest that good perception of prosodic stress, musical activities involving singing, and parental singing and reading may all be beneficial for word finding and other generative language skills in implanted children.
This study investigated how English suprasegmentals contribute to two aspects of pronunciation proficiency—comprehensibility and foreign-accentedness. Further, it discussed their implications for ...teaching English as a foreign language. The read speech of 35 volunteers, who were second language (L2) English speakers in Korea, was analyzed in terms of the following seven variables concerning English suprasegmentals: the number of pauses, total duration of pauses, articulation rate, mean length of run, pitch range, prominence frequency, and sentence stress appropriacy. The results of a multiple regression analysis showed that the number of pauses, the sentence stress appropriacy, and the articulation rate were significant predictors of L2 speech comprehensibility. Speech rate factors and prominence frequency were the strongest predictors of foreign-accentedness. In addition, these results suggest that better understanding in communicative contexts requires teaching learners about the placement of sentence stress without overemphasizing the mere rhythmic pattern of spoken English. The discussion explains how discourse-level pronunciation practice and information structures can be integrated into L2 speaking and listening to improve student benefits. KCI Citation Count: 4
This study investigates the role of sentence stress on the comprehension of sentences with clitic pronouns (unstressed morphemes and a typical feature of Romance languages) by children with cochlear ...implants (CIs).
Thirteen children (seven girls) with CIs and 15 children (seven girls) with NH between eight and 12 years who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated on a computerized sentence comprehension task that involved manipulation of stress placement of possible antecedent words to clitic pronouns.
Children with CIs were significantly less accurate than children with NH in comprehending sentences with clitics, regardless of sentence stress. For children with NH, stress on the correct antecedent significantly increased sentence comprehension accuracy. For children with CI, there was no significant effect of sentence stress on selecting the correct antecedent for clitic pronouns.
Comprehension of sentences with clitic pronouns is challenging for children with CIs and this challenge holds cross-linguistically. Furthermore, children with CIs do not use prosodic information to support comprehension of sentences with clitics similarly to NH children.
Language-specific syntactic, morphosyntactic, and prosodic contrasts affecting sentence comprehension need to be assessed in children with CIs to plan an effective intervention.
The areas affected by the L1 transfer to L2, such as phonotactics and stress, appear to have different degrees of erasability through training and practice. This paper attempts a theoretical analysis ...to account for empirical observations of L1 transfer in diphthong-coda coalescence and in sentence stress for Chinese learners of English in an American accent training course. Using the framework and tableau method of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), the phonological paradigm that views languages’ differences as symptomatic of differences in rankings of a set of universal violable constraints, this paper posits the underlying ranking at work in (a) the segmental case where aŋ is the observed output for /aʊn/; (b) the suprasegmental case where no stress contrast is observed for a pair of phonologically similar sentences with contrastive stress. It is argued that, in the segmental case, the coalescence of the second vowel of a diphthong with an alveolar nasal coda results from the high ranking of markedness constraints, including Complex Syllable; and in the suprasegmental case, sentence stress is greatly affected by changes in the ranking of the constraint culminativity. Aside from shedding light on the understudied issue of diphthong-coda coalescence, this research also contributes to the discussion of the comparative erasability of L1 transfer for the two areas and demonstrates how a deduction-based theoretical method may actually have practical implications for guiding the design of L2 teaching methodology of English pronunciation as well as for promoting native English speakers’ clearer understanding of Chinese learners of English on the global stage.
Listeners perceive high or rising pitch as stressed - at the word and sentence level (high-pitch bias). Since stressed syllables can also be low-pitched, this bias may lead to misinterpretations of ...word and sentence stress and thus slow down speech comprehension. We investigate the effect of immediate exposure with high- vs. low-pitched stressed syllables on the identification of word and sentence stress. Participants were exposed to utterances containing only high- vs. low-pitched stressed syllables. In experimental trials, they then heard either trisyllabic words with word stress on the second syllable (Experiment 1) or three-word-sentences with sentence stress on the second word (Experiment 2) and indicated the position of word/sentence stress. Stimuli were presented in three intonation conditions (high-pitched first, second, or third syllable/word). Both experiments endorsed the high-pitch bias, with an increase after high-pitch exposure. Our results suggest a speaker-independent re-weighting of acoustic cues to stress, which is driven by experience.
In this article we explore the process and product of languaging as it concerns the learning of the grammatical concept of voice (active, passive, and middle) in French. We examine and analyze the ...amount and type of languaging produced by a small sample of university students as they struggle to understand the concept of voice. Students who are high languagers learn about the grammatical concept of voice in French with greater depth of understanding than low languagers. We demonstrate that there is a relationship between the quality and quantity of languaging and performance as measured by immediate and delayed posttest stages. These findings suggest that languaging is a key component in the internalization process of second language grammatical concepts. Implications of our research for pedagogy are briefly considered.
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