Ettien N Koffi

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Verified

Ettien verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor at St. Cloud State University

Infant cry researchers, Fairbrother et al. (2019), Collardeau et al. (2019), Rahman et al. (2023), among others, have reported that crying alone triggers unwanted and intrusive thoughts in some postpartum parents, including thoughts of harming their babies. Barr (2014) states unambiguously that crying is the main trigger of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SB...

Scholarly accounts of infant cry began in earnest in the late 1960s. Subsequent studies have focused on creating a typology of cries in order to correlate them with specific pediatric behaviors or ailments. Instrumental acoustic phonetic tools have often been summoned to validate impressionistic assessments. However, because most pediatric scientis...

Delafosse (1900:15-18) remarked more than one hundred twenty years ago that Anyi was not a full-fledged tone language like Yoruba, nor was it an accent language like English or French. Quaireau (1978:217-8) came to the same conclusion regarding the suprasegmental status of Anyi. I concur with them that Anyi is hard to classify suprasegmentally beca...

Do speakers produce the same word differently if its grammatical function changes? The word is used to provide some answers. This word is optimal because it is one of a few English words whose orthography and pronunciation remain the same across three grammatical functions. is spelled and pronounced the same when it functions as a direct object, an...

McCrum (2010:285) claims that English has now attained the status of a global language. He therefore coined the term "Globish" to describe the vast reach of English around the globe. He also notes that "Globish will remain the means by which an educated minority of the planet communicates." On page 232, he attributes the expanding influence of Engl...

Koffi (2019) investigated the acoustic correlates that Arabic L2 speakers of English use to encode lexical stress. This study replicates the same methodology and uses the same acoustic correlates and the same Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds. Whereas Koffi (2019) focused on a general population of Arabic speakers of English, the current...

Speech is a three-dimensional physical entity that consists of F0/pitch, intensity, and duration. This paper is the last of three publications devoted to a comprehensive review of the aforementioned correlates. Koffi (2019) and Koffi (2020) focused on F0/Pitch and intensity respectively. The current study is devoted entirely to duration. The goal b...

At present, Siri, Dragon Dictate, Google Voice, and Alexa-like functionalities are not available in any indigenous African language. Yet, a 2015 Pew Research found that between 2002 to 2014, mobile phone usage increased tenfold in Africa, from 8% to 83%. 1 The Acoustic Phonetic Approach (APA) discussed in this paper lays the foundation that will ma...

English is the main foreign language in schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Even though the Kingdom has made considerable budgetary sacrifices to raise English proficiency in the country, the results do not yet match expectations. According to English First (EF), in 2019, Saudi Arabia ranked “very low” on the English Proficiency Index (EPI). We...

Previous phonetic attempts to account for the intelligibility of L2 English vowels have relied exclusively on impressionistic acoustic approaches. In the impressionistic framework, native speakers (and sometimes nonnative speakers) are called upon to render comprehensibility and intelligibility judgments regarding speech samples that they hear and...

Munro et al. (1996, p. 328) and Munro and Derwing (2008, p. 493) report the results of perception studies in which they found that [ʌ] was one of the least well perceived vowels by General American English (GAE) hearers of L2 Englishes. Exploratory acoustic phonetic studies conducted on seven varieties of L2 Englishes support their findings in part...

The Pronunciation of /s/ 1 in Complex Onset and Coda Clusters in Somali-Accented English Ettien Koffi Saint Cloud State University The pronunciation of /s/ in complex onset and coda clusters presents a formidable challenge to Somali English Language Learners (ELLs). There are two primary reasons why /s/ contributes to accentedness. First, in Englis...

Talkers and hearers of Anyi, a West African language of the Akan family, are very adept at discriminating between sentences containing verbs conjugated in the indicative, the intentional, and the subjunctive moods just by relying on subtle variations in pitch. A phonetic investigation is undertaken to determine as precisely as possible the acoustic...

According to the Critical Band Theory, the auditory perception of F0 data is the same for all human beings. However, when F0 signals are transferred through the auditory cortex to specialized areas of the brain, they are perceived and processed differently depending on whether the language is tonal or accentual. In tone languages, F0 data appears t...

The lateral [l] and the rhotic [ɹ] are classified as liquids because their places and manners of articulation overlap in many languages (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996, p.185). As a result, when some L2 speakers of English produce them, these two segments are perceptually indistinguishable to some speakers of English. This is likely to cause unintellig...

The voiced interdental non-sibilant fricative [ð] produced by 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) and 67 non-native speakers of English is analyzed quantitatively and acoustically. The quantitative data shows that GAE talkers produced [ð] accurately 88.09% of the time, substituted it with [d̪ ] 2.38%, and with [n̪ ] 9.52%. L2 talke...

We investigate the social network and the acoustic vowel space of a Mandarin Chinese speaker of English. Our goal is to test Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, and determine whether or not the quality and quantity of input that our participant receives within his social network can help him to improve his pronunciation of English vowels. First, we did an...

This is a comprehensive instrumental account of the phonetic realizations [θ] in L2 Englishes. It involves the analysis of 539 segments and 77 spectrographs of [θ] produced by 10 native speakers of General American English and 67 L2 speakers of English. They all produced the same [θ] segment in the words , , , , and . The quantitative analysis of t...

This investigation of VOT (Voice Onset Time) of stop consonants in Montenegrin accented English started as linguistic curiosity when Abat realized in Prof. Koffi’s LabPhon (Laboratory Phonology course) that she produced [b, d, g] with negative VOT while many of her American classmates and other L2 students in the course did not. She recorded anothe...

Tone is a conundrum for linguists attempting to reduce African languages to writing. Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental data indicate that not marking tone at all leads to reading difficulties. The converse is also true, namely marking tone exhaustively reduces fluency, leads to false starts, and repairs. This article proposes an elegant but si...

Confusion research has been used for more than 50 years to test speech intelligibility in automatic speech recognition systems. In this paper, I apply its methodology and its findings to L2 English intelligibility research. Preliminary findings indicate that the Perceptual Distance Hypothesis (PDH) can help to predict vocalic substitutions that imp...

Midwest English (MWE) is the complete merger of / ɑ / and / ɔ /. Therefore, the phonemic inventory of CMnE vowels is reduced to 11 instead of the 12 that we see in other dialects. Finally, the last major change underway concerns the vowel / ʊ /. When the female 2 residents of Central Minnesota produce it, they open their mouths a little wider and d...

The book proposes a paradigm shift in language planning and language policy in Africa. For the past fifty years, the dominant model has been the hegemonic model whereby a language of wider communication (LWC) is imposed on minority languages. It is now time for a paradigm shift in favor of a more egalitarian model in which all the languages spoken...

I stole the idea of a " linguistic " portfolio from the students in the Arts Department. Semester after semester, I see their works on display. So, I thought that it would be a great idea to display the great linguistic works that the students who take courses in linguistics and TESL produce each semester. This dream has become reality thanks to fu...

The Pronunciation of /s/ 1 in Complex Onset and Coda Clusters in Somali-Accented English Ettien Koffi Saint Cloud State University The pronunciation of /s/ in complex onset and coda clusters presents a formidable challenge to Somali English Language Learners (ELLs). There are two primary reasons why /s/ contributes to accentedness. First, in Englis...

Clements and Kyser (1985:28) note that the most prevalent syllabic structure found in world languages is the CV pattern, that is, a single Consonant followed by a single Vowel. English far exceeds this minimal requirement by allowing up to four consonants in the coda. This heavy coda structure clashes with the simple Somali CV (C) syllable structur...

In Greek as well as in many languages, the verb agrees with its subject in number and in person. Such an agreement is reflected morphologically on the verb through suffixation. If the subject is a compound noun phrase, that is, NP + NP, the general tendency for Greek verbs is to agree with the NP closest to them. However, agreement can also be cont...