| 1. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953-, et al.
(author)
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The relative perceptual weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts
- 2015
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In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015. - Chania 73100, Greece : Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech. - 9786188235106 ; , s. 1-7
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Abstract. In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyllabic words. When making curriculums for second language learners, teachers are helped by knowing which phonetic or phonological features are more or less crucial for the intelligibility of speech and there are some structural and anecdotal evidence that word stress should play a more important role for intelligibility of Swedish, than the tonal word accent. The Swedish word stress is about prominence contrasts between syllables, mainly signaled by syllable duration, while the tonal word accent is signaled mainly by pitch contour. The word stress contrast, as in armen [´arːmən] ‘the arm’ - armén [ar´meːn] ‘the army’, the first word trochaic and the second iambic, is present in all regional varieties of Swedish, and realized with roughly the same acoustic cues, while the tonal word accent, as in anden [´anːdən] ‘the duck’ - anden [`anːdən] ‘the spirit’ is absent in some dialects (as well as in singing), and also signaled with a variety of tonal patterns depending on region. The present study aims at comparing the respective perceptual weight of the two mentioned contrasts. Two lexical decision tests were carried out where in total 34 native Swedish listeners should decide whether a stimulus was a real word or a non-word. Real words of all mentioned categories were mixed with nonsense words and words that were mispronounced with opposite stress pattern or opposite tonal word accent category. The results show that distorted word stress caused more non-word judgments and more loss, than distorted word accent. Our conclusion is that intelligibility of Swedish is more sensitive to distorted word stress pattern than to distorted tonal word accent pattern. This is in compliance with the structural arguments presented above, and also with our own intuition.
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| 2. |
- Abelin, Åsa, 1953, et al.
(author)
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The relative weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts
- 2015
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In: E. Babatsouli & D. Ingram (eds.) Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, 7 - 10 September 2015, Chania, Greece. - 9786188235106 ; , s. 1-7
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)
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| 3. |
- Ball, Martin J., 1951-
(author)
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Multilingualism and acquired neurogenic speech disorders
- 2015
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In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015. - Chania, Crete : Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech. - 9786188235106 ; , s. 40-46
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Acquired neurogenic communication disorders can affect language, speech, or both. Although neurogenic speech disorders have been researched for a considerable time, much of this work has been restricted to a few languages (mainly English, with German, French, Japanese and Chinese also represented). Further, the work has concentrated on monolingual speakers. In this account, I aim to outline the main acquired speech disorders, and give examples of research into multilingual aspects of this topic. The various types of acquired neurogenic speech disorders support a tripartite analysis of normal speech production. Dysarthria (of varying sub - types) is a disorder of the neural pathways and muscle activity: the implementation of the motor plans for speech. Apraxia of speech on the other hand is a disorder of compilation of those motor plans (seen through the fact that novel utterances are disordered, while often formulaic utterances are not). Aphasia (at least when it affects speech rather than just language) manifests as a disorder at the phonological level; for example, paraphasias disrupt the normal ordering of segments, and jargon aphasias affect both speech sound inventories and the link between sound and meaning. I will illustrate examples of various acquired neurogenic speech dis orders in multilingual speakers drawn from recent literature. We will conclude by considering an example of jargon aphasia produced by a previously bilingual speaker (that is, bilingual before the acquired neurological damage). This example consists of non - perseverative non - word jargon, produced by a Louisiana French - English bilingual woman with aphasia. The client’s jargon has internal systematicity and these systematic properties show overlaps with both the French and English phonological system and structure. Therefore, while she does not have access to the lexicon of either language, it would seem that she accesses both the French and English phonological systems.
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| 4. |
- Tronnier, Mechtild, et al.
(author)
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Rhythmic contrast between Swedish and Albanian as an explanation for L2-speech?
- 2015
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In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015. - Chania, Greece : Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech. - 9786188235106 ; , s. 396-402
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Based on observations of the rhythmic structure of L2-speech produced by L1-speakers of Albanian – which suggest the occurrence of transfer – a study is presented here that compares durational aspects between the two languages. In order to do this, speech read by Swedish and Albanian L1-speakers was recorded and investigated, and normalized durational factors were analysed. The results, however, do not support the assumption that there is variation in the rhythmic structure between the two languages. According to the results, transfer cannot explain previous observations.
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