
Rebecca HincksKTH Royal Institute of Technology | KTH · Unit for Language and Communication
Rebecca Hincks
Doctor of Philosophy
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Publications (25)
Stress is a feature of pronunciation in which a syllable is given more emphasis than surrounding syllables.
Sound cannot be studied methodically unless it can be captured in some way, and so from the phonograph to the tape recorder to the computer, the development of new technologies has facilitated the study of phonetics. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine studying phonetics without technology. Other entries in this encyclopedia discuss the topics of ac...
This paper quantifies differences in speaking rates in a first and second language, and examines the effects of slower rates on the speakers’ abilities to convey information. The participants were 14 fluent (CEF B2/C1) English L2 speakers who held the same oral presentation twice, once in English and once in their native Swedish. The temporal varia...
This paper investigates learner response to a novel kind of intonation feedback generated from speech analysis. Instead of displays of pitch curves, our feedback is flashing lights that show how much pitch variation the speaker has produced. The variable used to generate the feedback is the standard deviation of fundamental frequency as measured in...
A series of novel capabilities have been designed to extend the repertoire of Ville, a virtual language teacher for Swedish, created at the Centre for Speech technology at KTH. These capabilities were tested by twenty-seven language students at KTH. This paper reports on qualitative surveys and quantitative performance from these sessions which sug...
In this report we describe an attempt to build up an inter-university network among active teachers and students throughout Sweden, its failures and successes, and the general lessons that can be learnt from the experience. Background. Scholarly networking has always been necessary to scholars, but it is only in the last twenty years that truly rap...
This paper analyzes prosodic variables in a corpus of eighteen oral presentations made by students of Technical English, all of whom were native speakers of Swedish. The focus is on the extent to which speakers were able to use their voices in a lively manner, and the hypothesis tested is that speakers who had high pitch variation as they spoke wou...
This paper proposes that speech analysis be used to quantify prosodic variables in presentation speech, and repo rts the results of a perception test of speaker liveliness. The test ma- terial was taken from a corpus of oral presentation s made by 18 Swedish native students of Technical English. L iveliness ratings from a panel of eight judges corr...
Twenty ten-minute oral presentations made by Swedish students speaking English have been analyzed with respect to the standard deviation of F 0 over long stretches of speech. Values have been normalized by division with the mean. Results show a strong correlation between proficiency in English and pitch variation for male speakers but not for femal...
Standard advice to people preparing to speak in public is to use a "lively" voice. A lively voice is described as one that varies in intonation, rhythm and loudness: qualities that can be analyzed using speech analysis software. This paper reports on a study analyzing pitch variation as a measure of speaker liveliness. A potential application of th...
This paper explores the concept of a speech checker for use in the production of oral presentations. The speech checker would be specially adapted speaker-dependent software to be used as a tool in the rehearsal of a presentation. The speech checker would localize mispronounced words and words unlikely to be known by an audience, give feedback on t...
Educators and researchers in the acquisition of L2 phonology have called for empirical assessment of the progress students make after using new methods for learning (Chun, 1998, Morley, 1991). The present study investigated whether unlimited access to a speech-recognition-based language-learning program would improve the general standard of pronunc...
This paper is an analysis of lexical choices, pronunciation errors, and discourse features found in a corpus of student presentation speech. The speakers were Swedish natives studying Technical English. Particular emphasis is given to the pronunciation of the words most often used in academic texts. 93% of words used in the corpus came from the mos...
This paper explores the concept of a speech checker for use in the production of oral presentations. The speech checker would be specially adapted speaker-dependent software to be used as a tool in the rehearsal of a presentation. The speech checker would localize mispronounced words and words unlikely to be known by an audience, give feedback on t...
This paper reports on a study carried out on a group of KTH students studying Technical English. Students used WaveSurfer audiovisual synthesis to experiment with differences in pitch and duration in Swedish-English cognates. The exercise helped students achieve long-term acquisition of correct lexical stress for the par- ticular words.
This paper analyzes some of the results of the use of PhonePass, a telephone-based test of spoken English that uses automatic speech recognition. It finds that the test provides sensitive measures of speech rate and phonetic accuracy.
This paper analyzes some of the results of the use of PhonePass, a telephone-based test of spoken English that uses automatic speech recognition. It finds that the test provides sensi-tive measures of speech rate and phonetic accuracy.
This paper reports on an experimental study comparing two groups of seven Chinese students of English who practiced oral presentations with computer feedback. Both groups imitated teacher models and could listen to recordings of their own production. The test group was also shown flashing lights that responded to the standard deviation of the funda...
This paper reports on an experimental study comparing two groups of seven Chinese students of English who practiced oral presentations with computer feedback. Both groups imi tated teacher models and could listen to recordings of their own production. The test group was also shown flashing lights that responded to the standard deviation of the fund...
The use of speech analysis in teaching second language discourse intonation has traditionally relied upon the visual display of pitch contours over short segments of speech. A number of re- searchers have pointed out that this method has considerable limitations. We report our test of the idea that valuable information about learner intonation can...
1 Academic Networking Networking has always been necessary to scholars, but it is only in the last twenty years that truly rapid asynchronic networking has become feasible for the academic community, only in the last decade for students, and perhaps only in the last five years that such networking has begun to be seen as a natural extension of one'...
This thesis concerns the use of speech technology to support the process of learning the English language. It applies theories of computer-assisted language learning and second language acquisition to address the needs of beginning, intermediate and advanced students of English for specific purposes.The thesis includes an evaluation of speech-recog...