Eva EstebasNational Distance Education University | UNED · Department of Foreign Philologies and their Linguistics
Eva Estebas
Doctor of Philosophy
About
50
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580
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Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (50)
This paper examines the creation and running of the Language MOOC (LMOOC) “The Acquisition of English Pronunciation through Songs and Literary Texts” (1st ed.) and its effects on the proficiency rates of English pronunciation of a group of Spanish speakers registered in the 'Degree in English Studies' offered at the Distance Learning University in...
The aim of this study is to define the concept of "prosodic well-formedness" by identifying the main difficulties
of categorization of prosodic mistakes in an automatic CAPT (Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training)
system, with the goal of improving the teaching and learning of L2 intonation. The data include the results of a
manual revision by t...
This paper examines the differences in the division of intonation phrases and in the tonal structure of the nuclear configuration (i.e., the last pitch accent and the following boundary tone) in imitated and in authentic English-accented Spanish. The same Spanish text was read by four native speakers of American English, who produced the text with...
The teaching of intonation to learners of a second language (L2) tends to be an arduous and often neglected task even in specialized phonetic classes. This difficulty generally increases in a distance learning environment where students have to approach prosodic issues in an autonomous way. This paper tests the advantages and disadvantages of using...
The aim of this paper is to present a phonological description of the boundary tones in final and non-final declarative sentences in Spanish, drawn from a read news corpus and a dialogue corpus. The final clauses tend to finish with L*L% and sometimes L+H*L%. Four different pitch configurations can be found for non-final patterns: a rise (L*H%), a...
This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of using TL_ToBI to teach English intonation to Spanish native speakers in a distance learning environment. A study was carried out to compare the production of English intonation patterns by two groups of Spanish students of English phonetics, each of them trained with a different methodology: 1...
This paper investigates how pitch range variability affects meaning across languages. In particular, it examines how speakers of different cultural backgrounds, namely, English and Spanish, perceive and evaluate sentences produced with a different pitch range. A perception test was designed by means of which 15 native speakers of each language eval...
Literature review on prosody reveals the lack of corpora for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish. In this paper, we present a corpus intended to fill this gap. The corpus comprises two distinct data-sets, a news subcorpus and a dialogue subcorpus, the latter containing either conversational or task-oriented speech. More than 25 h were recorded...
The goal of this paper is to present a new methodology for the teaching and learning of English intonation in a self-tuition environment based on a simplified version of the ToBI system. The new proposal aims at teaching students how to identify some of the most common tunes of English intonation and how to reproduce them in a
distance learning set...
Literature review on prosody reveals the lack of corpora for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish. In this paper, we present a corpus intended to fill this gap. The corpus comprises two distinct data-sets, a news subcorpus and a dialogue subcorpus, the latter containing either conversational or task-oriented speech. More than 25 h were recorded...
In this paper, we present an experiment on computer assisted
prosodic labeling in which a labeler team validates or corrects ToBI pitch
accents automatically predicted by a classifier. The innovative aspect of
this automatic system is that it is not a deterministic prediction model,
it offers the human transcriber more than one label per word (mult...
This paper presents a technique that allows us to detect similarities among prosodic labels used to describe pitch accents within the ToBI framework. The inter-label proximity is determined empirically as a result of the evidence obtained in contingency tables of inter-transcriber agreement tests and in the confusion matrices used in automatic pros...
En este artículo se estudian las oraciones interrogativas absolutas
informativas y confirmatorias en el español peninsular central. Esta
distinción, documentada ya en otras lenguas, se puede manifestar a
través de la entonación mediante la utilización de distintas
configuraciones nucleares. Los datos se han obtenido mediante una
técnica de elicitac...
We conducted a production experiment with 1600 potentially ambiguous utterances distinguished by word boundary location in Catalan and Spanish (e.g., Cat. mirà batalles ‘(s)he looked at battles’ vs. mirava talles ‘I/(s)he used to look at carvings’; Span. da balazos ‘(s)he fires shots’ vs. daba lazos ‘I/(s)he gave ribbons’; stressed syllables are un...
The aim of this study is to compare the intonation of neutral declaratives in Peninsular Spanish (PS) and in Argentinean Spanish (AS) by means of the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Previous works showed that both varieties differ in the production of both nuclear and pre-nuclear accents. In this study we demonstrate that there is a more robust p...
The main aim of this study is to provide evidence of the existence of four contrastive tonal levels in sentence final position (boundary tones) in Peninsular Spanish Recent studies on Spanish intonation within the Sp_ToBI annotation system have incorporated two additional tones (a mid tone, M% and an extra high tone, HH%) to the original boundary t...
El principal objetivo de esta investigación es proporcionar evidencia de la existencia de cuatro niveles tonales contrastivos en posición final de frase (tonos de frontera) en español peninsular. Estudios recientes sobre la entonación del español siguiendo los parámetros del sistema de notación prosódica Sp_ToBI han visto la necesidad de postular d...
This thesis investigates the use of accentuation to indicate broad and narrow focus in the Central dialect of Catalan. In response to a question such as “Who sang the song?” English speakers can say “JOE sang the song”, indicating the narrow focus of the answer by an accent on “Joe” and by the absence of accents on the following words. It has been...
This book is aimed at helping Spanish speakers to overcome their communication problems in English by introducing the most relevant issues of English pronunciation and comparing them with those of Spanish pronunciation. It covers not only vowels and consonants but also other aspects such as stress, rhythm, intonation, words in company, combination...
The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between focus and downstep in Central Catalan declaratives produced with two peaks. In particular, we examine the hypothesis that broad focus is associated to a downstepped second peak whereas narrow focus blocks the downstep movement. In utterances produced with narrow focus two variables were t...
The aim of this paper is to examine the importance of phonetic detail in the phonological interpretation of intonation by analysing the case of rising prenuclear accents in English and Spanish declarative sentences. In order to find out the phonological units that better account for the rising F0 trajectories in the two languages, I recorded one En...
El principal objetivo de este artículo es presentar una nueva propuesta de etiquetaje prosódico del español mediante el modelo métrico-autosegmental de análisis entonativo, Sp_ToBI (Spanish ToBI). Para esta versión de Sp_ToBI nos hemos basado en 1) trabajos tradicionales sobre la entonación del español, 2) una revisión de artículos anteriores sobre...
Este estudio analiza los patrones de alineación de los acentos ascendentes prenucleares en frases declarativas en español y examina la posibilidad de interpretar estos contornos mediante un acento tonal bajo (L*) y un tono alto de frontera de palabra (H). Estos patrones se analizaron mediante un experimento de producción que consistía en 20 pares d...
The aim of this paper is to examine the phonetic and phonological properties of prenuclear accents in Central Catalan declaratives within the Autosegmental-Metrical approach of intonational analysis.
Prenuclear accents show a rising movement whose peak tends to be aligned after the accented syllable. Three possible interpretations for the modelling...
The aim of this paper is to investigate the tonal structure of narrow focus signalled by accentual means in English and in Catalan. In particular, it analyses the status of the F0 valley in the H(igh)-L(ow) movement observed after the focal constituent. In both languages, the H is interpreted as an H* pitch accent given its alignment within the acc...
The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the F0 valleys observed between H* prenuclear accents in British English neutral declaratives are the result of a phonetic transition between F0 peaks or must be specified as a phonological target. The scaling and the alignment of the F0 valleys are examined in 72 declarative sentences, produced by a...
The aim of this thesis is threefold: 1) to investigate to what extent intonational (accentual) strategies are used in Central Catalan to signal the information structure of sentences as compared to syntactic devices, 2) to describe the phonetic and phonological properties of broad and narrow focus sentences in Central Catalan, and 3) to compare the...
This paper examines two aspects of the intonation of S(ubject) V(erb) O(bject) Central Catalan declaratives produced in reading speech. First, it deals with the identification of an intermediate level of prosodic phrasing in Central Catalan declaratives. Second, it analyses the immediate implications of this intermediate phrase on the phonological...
The phonological interpretation of pre-nuclear rising accents in Catalan declaratives is examined within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Former studies have shown that pre-nuclear rises can neither be described as L*+H (the H is not located at a fixed distance from L* as expected in bitonality) nor as H* with peak delay (there is no correlati...
In this paper we present the results of a study that is part of a project that examines the role of singing and reciting in the teaching and learning of English phonetics to non- native speakers. Our objective is to propose a different approach to the teaching of English phonetics which consists of adopting a top-down perspective, that is, from a s...
This paper examines peak fundamental frequency (F0) downtrends in Central Catalan sentences produced with a neutral declarative intonation. The tendency of an F0 decline over the course of an utterance is a well-known property of speech. However, the interpretation of such a downtrend varies in the literature. Whereas sometimes the downward trend o...
The aim of this paper is to clarify the phonological interpretation of the last pitch accent in English and Spanish neutral declaratives within the Autosegmental-Metrical approach of intonational analysis. Whereas in English the last pitch accent of a declarative is described as an H* accent followed by an L% boundary tone, no matter the number of...
This paper examines the phonetic and phonological properties of the last pitch accent in Catalan single and multi-stressed neutral declaratives. Traditionally, the different F0 patterns observed in single stressed structures (clear F0 peak) and in multi-stressed structures (progressively falling slope or a strongly lowered F0 peak) have been subjec...
In this paper we analyze the relationship between focus and downstep in Central Catalan declaratives produced with two peaks. In particular, we examine the hypothesis that broad focus is associated to a downstepped second peak whereas narrow focus blocks the downstep movement. Both broad and narrow focus structures have been analyzed. In utterances...
Projects
Projects (3)
Mejorar la docencia de distintas asignaturas de Grado y Máster dentro del área de los estudios ingleses.
Creación de una batería de pruebas para la evaluación de la
prosodia del español. A diferencia de otras pruebas existentes, el objetivo de cada prueba es evaluar la prosodia en función de un uso comunicativo determinado (expresión de diferentes tipos de actos de habla, emociones, actitudes, gestión del fondo común, contrastes
informativos…). Los usos comunicativos evaluados están distribuidos en tres niveles de dificultad, inspirados de forma parcial en la propuesta curricular del Instituto Cervantes para la enseñanza de ELE (Instituto Cervantes, 2006). De este modo, se pretende contribuir al desarrollo de herramientas de evaluación automática de la prosodia.
The Glissando corpus is a prosodic corpus for Spanish and Catalan which has proved the capabilities of extensive speech corpora for the empirical study of prosody. The corpus comprises two distinct data-sets, a news subcorpus and a dialogue subcorpus, the latter containing either unplanned conversations or task dialogues oriented to a specific goal in the domain of information request (travel information, information request for an exchange university course and information request for a touristic route). The recordings were made in high acoustic quality by two profiles of speakers: broadcasting and advertising professionals and native undergraduate students. The twenty-five hours of recordings cover different reading styles (radio, advertising and neutral), registers (reading news, formal and informal dialogue), voices (male and female) and languages (central Catalan and standard European Spanish). The inclusion of these variables aims to facilitate cross-linguistic, interspeaker and inter-style analyses.
