Phonetics - Science topic

I would imagine the differences are speaker independent. For example, if you have an L2 speaker who is near native or at least very fluent, I would suspect that their phonology is closer to native phonology as well. However, for those who are at an entry level L2 they probably have much more L1 type phonology. I am basing this assumption more on the idea of non-native accent and prosody in new L2 learners. I would compare it to learning to do something left handed that you normally have been doing something right handed your whole life. The L2 muscle memory isn’t there so until those mental pathways are more developed and the L2 is more natural the speaker is going to have to try harder to think about each pronunciation more (Or at least have a few hold outs from the L1 that make it hard to achieve the new L2 phonology map). If you look at some studies on 2nd language prosody and rhythm I think this is apparent. It takes deliberate training (or retraining) to learn to add the correct prosody on top of a new L2. I suspect that the same is true with the basic phonological systems as well. - It’s possible that maybe I am over thinking your question or missing what you‘re asking… but from the accent reduction work I have done I think it’s a learning thing more than a general statement.

I completely agree with your view on the importance of language.But I don't know much about English.Maybe I can talk about Chinese. In fact, Chinese has different pronunciations in different places, such as Cantonese. Cantonese doesn't pronounce according to the pronunciation in Chinese dictionaries, but it is also beautiful. I think this diversity of pronunciations also reflects the richness and inclusiveness of our Chinese language.And it also reflects the local culture.I hope my answer can be useful for you.

Dear Maria,

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on obtaining such an important qualification as a doctorate.

Before I became a doctor, I worked in the public administration and once I obtained my degree, it allowed me to obtain the position because my merits increased. I think you should focus on the field in which you were trained and make different applications depending on your interests. In the European Union the job placement rate for doctors is very high. I don't know about other parts of the world.

Best regards and good luck in the new year.

i dont know in praat itself, but many scripts are available online given by scientists working in different phonetic -phonology labs

1. The GSU Praat Tools package is available for free down-

load from psyvoso.googlepages.com/softwaredownload

2. https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~cdicanio/scripts.html

3. http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/facilities/acoustic/praat.html

The assimilation phenomena are the influences that a sound makes to another. We have the progressive assimilation when the preceding sound changes the characteristics of the following: [aθ't̪̟eka] the voiceless interdental fricative consonant interdentalized the voiceless dental oclusive consonant. In the other hand, the regressive assimilation takes place when the following sound influences to the preceding: [an̪dalu'θia] the voiced dental occlusive consonant dentalized the alveolar nasal, but here we have also the progressive assimilation because the alveolar nasal made the voiced dental occlusive consonant mantain its occlusion. Finally, the dissimilation is the process by which two sounds variate their characteristics in order to emphasise the difference between them: an example could be the evolution of the medieval Spanish sibilants.

There is not a kind of IPA for the sign languages like the phonetic table as we can see commonly for transcription. The parameters that could be used for the sign languages may include several facts like the mouth movements, the proximity to the body, the hand gestures, etc. It is an interesting project that can be addressed and developed in the future.

Very useful! Thank you!

Johan Schalin Thanks for the reply. I will read it with great interest.

Formula (1), for three formants translates simply as:

((F2-F1) + (F3-F2))/2

and for four formants it would be:

((F2-F1) + (F3-F2) + (F4 - F3))/3

etc.

Hi Eman,

It would help to know what you are trying to look into? Like Leônidas suggests a transformation may be appropriate for your research question and there are various ones out there depending on your needs (for example, there are several ways to normalise the vowel space between speakers).

The reason I don't think there is a clear cut answer to which transformation to use and whether to use one at all, is that we are dealing with a complex phenomenon. A useful way of thinking about this is that a formant is an just an acoustic measurement (or perhaps a series of acoustic measurements if you can deal with time series data) that reflects the state of a speakers articulatory system. It arises from some possibly very non-trivial interaction of the voice source and vocal tract resonances.The resonances are not formants per se because they are properties of the physical system that may or may not be fed acoustic energy. There's a developing body of literature on using computational models for determining the resonances and looking at their relation to observed formants. The results tell us that for large low voiced males the picture is mainly the way text books often lay it out, but that there are confounds (like variation in vocal tract anatomy due to age, gender and individual factors and dynamically nasality) that produce surprising effects.

And finally, depending on your question and materials, it might make sense to look at even more formants and possibly transformations between them. Before doing so, I would encourage you to plot the data and see how it behaves, so that you'll have a clearer understanding of what is happening. I've seen F4 recommended as some sort of normalising value for one of the lower formants and then looked at F4 in a data set I was working on only to discover that it was so badly tracked that I could not trust it and had to use other analysis methods.

Best of luck,

Pertti

Dear عائشة عبد الواحد thank you for the invaluable answer.

Hazim Al Dilaimy

Thank you for this great question,

For me, my favorite lessons are:

Distinctive features in structural phonology and generative phonology,

And the generative phonology in general, especially the modern generative phonology,

Prosodic phonology,

And the leadership of Indians and Arabs in the Ancient phonological studies.

You could check out POnSS as reported in the following study. Rodd, J., Decuyper, C., Bosker, H. R., & Ten Bosch, L. (2020). A tool for efficient and accurate segmentation of speech data: Announcing POnSS. Behavior Research Methods, 53(2), 744-756. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01449-6 Good luck,

Montreal Forced Aligner is also a good option for speech segmentation.

There are 5 vocal cord positions

1. Median (midline)

2. Paramedian (1.5 mm from the midline)

3. Cadaver (3.5 mm from the midline)

4. Partial Abduction (7 mm from the midline)

5. Full abduction (9.5 mm from the midline)

Desalegn Abraha Gebrekidan

https://www.phonic.ai/ lacks only one of the sections which I need. I have a long main text and its related audio file which should be uploaded. The subjects are required to listen to the main text and then answer the following questions vocally. Their answers should be recorded and uploaded on a server. This website is only designed for questions and answers and there is no section for the main text, from which the questions are asked.

Hola,

Para el cálculo de la frecuencia léxica de unidades simples o complejas, se suele utilizar WordSmith o AntCon.

Saludos

It will help if you use a suitable and powerful qualitative research software as Atlas.ti (https://atlasti.com/) or equivalent. This software allows you to introduce and research large amounts of text, written or oral, images, videos, etc. Then, you can select diverse research techniques, including frequencies, correlations, modulations, structures, and several other tools.

I recently know a software for perception study, used by a researcher from Hong Kong of China?

I recently heard from Michael Ashby, current president of the International Phonetic Association, that he wrote a paper on OCR of IPA characters. But this was for printed text, not handwritten transcriptions.

> Ashby, Michael. 2017. Recognition where it’s due: Some experiments in optical character recognition (OCR) for phonetic symbols. Journal of the English Phonetic Society of Japan 21. 63–79.

He told me I could freely distribute it so it's attached

Linguistically,we do not have an accent that is much knottier than others,nor more prestigous,but it is a matter that is mainly accompained with it spread and usage by the speakers.

Accent is a variety of pronunciation whereas dialect is a variety of language. Allophone is a member of the same phoneme. Allomorph can be tackled within the framework of Grammar. These are some basic concepts. For further details, just have a look at the books of Grammar, Phonetics and Phonology.

Fortis is a term that refers to voiceless consonants as their production is stronger than the production of lenis consonants. They need much more effort. Lenis is a term referring to voiced consonants that need less effort in their production. As for phonemic transcription, both should be enclosed between slashes to make them different from the letters used in ordinary spelling.

Found! https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association/illustrations-of-the-ipa

As aptly described many here, phonology is to with 'rules' underlying speech sounds of a language it has to deal with distinctive features, markedness etc....which set of speech sounds are considered same in a language and which set of speech sounds are contrasted in that language.

where as phonetics simply describes properties of speech sounds- acoustical, articulator or motor production..

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful constituents of words; Words are composed of morphemes (one or more). sing-er-s, home-work, un-kind-ly, flipp-ed, de-nation-al-iz-ation nej-ne-ob-hospod.ar-ova-tel-nejˇs-´ıho, auto-servis-u Morph. The term morpheme is used both to refer to an abstract entity and its concrete realization(s) in speech or writing. When it is needed to maintain the signified and signifier distinction, the term morph is used to refer to the concrete entity, while the term morpheme is reserved for the abstract entity only.

yes, it can help at a considerable degree. I recommend using CALL programs as Pronunciation Power, it is very effective in the teaching of vowels and consonants for foreign learners as it demonstrates the lips movements, the tongue articulation and the jaw shape ( place and manner of articulation).

May I suggest "Techniques of teaching comparative pronunciation in Arabic and English ( Odisho, 2005 )". There's a full phonetic transcription of middle eastern Arabic if this is what you're looking for. I have an idea about this but I may not be a good speaker of Hijazi Arabic to be able to recognize the pronunciation of their dialect. I hope this helps.

Ohh! Sorry I didn't catch that you were asking about the system used in that conference paper.

Best of luck.

Phonetics is the study of the the physical properties of human speech, such as how basic sounds are physically produced, their acoustics, and how they are perceived.

Phonology deals with language sounds in abstract, grammatical terms. It often focuses on the systems of phonemes in particular languages and describes how they work. Phonology also deals with acoustic phenomena at syllable level (e.g., morae) or even sentence-level (e.g., sentence level stress).

Thank you Christina Valaki! I have also come across that paper since my inquiry! However, I am still looking for information for the Turkish language.. This is turning out to be more complicated than anticipated..

Thank you all for giving me tips! This is all very helpful and highly appreciated!

Also, in phonemic transcriptions we use slashes / pei/as normally in phonetic dictionaries , but I have to exchange them to square brackets [ ] in addition to the use of aspiration theory (initially- after /s/ or final position) in phonetic transcriptions

Following answers.

Hello, Isabel Schiller . I have been dveleoping a physics-based synthesizer of dysphonic voices. In this link you will find more information and a prototype for download: https://cic.unb.br/~lucero/synthesis_en.html . The synthesizer is able to produce sustained vowels with controlled levels of breathiness, jitter, tremor, and other effects, and I am currently working on consonant-vowel sequences.

ربما

In our paper "Sound to meaning mappings in the Bouba-Kiki effect." we've created hundreds of nonsense words with the aim of determining how the various phonemes contribute to attributed meanings (related the object shape). I don't have the other papers handy, but in our paper we reference several papers that similarly attempt to isolate/characterize how various phonemes are related to meanings. Some reads I would recommend 1) Nielsen, A., & Rendall, D. (2011). The sound of round: evaluating the sound-symbolic role of consonants in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon. 2) Magnus (2001) What's in a Word? Studies in Phonosemantics 3) Fort, Martin and Peperkamp (2014) Consonants are More Important than Vowels in the Bouba-kiki Effect

Most of these papers focus on specific sound-to-meaning mapping (e.g. sound-shape mapping)

The thesis by Margaret Magnus takes a more comprehensive look at how sounds in English are mapped to a variety of meanings.

What is being done to address the most fundamental problem that Spanish-speaking EFL students have, namely Pronunciation?

Dear Antonio:

Congratulations and thank you so much for asking this most important question, particularly, the one related that deals with the problem of Spanish-speaking EFL students have with pronunciation.

Like this manner, in the following article, PRONUNCIATION PROBLEMS FOR SPANISH-SPEAKING LEARNERS OF ENGLISH, we may see as well relevant information about this topic.

Although a strong Spanish accent is usually easier to understand than a similarly strong French or Portuguese one, the pronunciation can cause considerable strain for the listener and seem somewhat harsh and flat. More importantly, Spanish speakers often have listening comprehension far below their other skills.

School English lessons in most Spanish-speaking countries also tend to focus much more on reading and grammar than speaking and listening, and so pronunciation work will both help redress the balance and be considered worthwhile by students.

This article will focus mainly on pronunciation problems that cause miscomprehension, including some attempt to prioritize the entries in each section. The sections themselves are arranged more traditionally, starting with individual sounds.

Source:

(https://www.tefl.net/elt/articles/teacher-technique/spanish-speaker-pronunciation-problems/)

Likewise, Spanish and Catalan are Romances languages, closely related to Italian and Portuguese; they belong to the Indo-European family. Variations in Spanish are noticeable within Spain itself, and also between metropolitan Spain and the varieties spoken in the Americas. However, these differences are largely confined to pronunciation and vocabulary, morphology, and syntax being fairly standard everywhere. With a little experience, all varieties are mutually intelligible.

Despite its limited geographical spread, Catalan varies appreciably from one area to another, though the variations are largely within pronunciation and vocabulary. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility, though the variety spoken in the Balearics is significantly different from mainland Catalan.

Source: (https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/34044429/learner_english__Swan___Smith.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1520533669&Signature=h4cO8G1PrkwaLVpJUj8uxyc8lHk%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DLearner_English_by_Swan_and_Smith.pdf)

Swan, M., & Smith, B. (2001). Learner English: a teacher's guide to interference and other problems. pages: 90-97. Cambridge handbooks for language teachers.

Best wishes,

Javier.

What is the evidence that testing with English word lists is not valid. Patients and testers are naturally reluctant for the use of English lists on foreign speakers, but in my experience meaningful results can be obtained.

Distinctive features refer to a trait that distinguishes one speech sound from another. For example, at the articulatory level, the difference between /s/ and /z/ is the voicing. At the phonetic level, that is, the physical manifestation of the signal in instrumental analysis (phonetic), the /s/ has concentration of energy in the high frequency region as opposed to the voiced /z/. Such features were thought to help the listener distinguish between these minimal pairs in perception. But please note that other pairs may have the same phonetic features even though the ear identifies them as different. Therefore, phonetic features do not necessarily have phonological relevance.

Dear Ali, In Macedonia' s literature homophones are elaborated in the part that cope with lexical issue. But, one angle of dealing with homophones can be semantics too. It depends on the aspect from which you are approaching,

Kind regrads,

V. Janusheva

I would use an WFST for that. Similarities defined through weights on the arc. You can compose the input with your similarity-weighted FST and You can have the n-best (most similar) ones. OpenFst. Soundex is a bit rough for real phoneticians, but I guess it does the job.

Praat is so useful dear.

Regards

A group of parameters are important for that purpose, for example:

Pitch, Harmonics, First five formants at list, Duration, Melody, Intonation, Sonority, Transitions of phonemes, etc.

Best regards,

D. Escobedo

If you were able to find a database of English words in IPA and import that into SIL's Phonology Assistant program (https://www.sil.org/resources/software_fonts/phonology-assistant, its free) you could easily answer your question and also look at it from multiple angles. 

If you can't find a database in IPA, you could import the CMU corpus above, but you would have to define the phonological features of each of the graphemes and digraphemes. If would be a little bit of work, but not too much. You could then easily compare your results against a token frequency list such as found at (http://www.wordfrequency.info/)

I think the effect that it has is that we can recognise the harmonic pattern and thus recognise the speaker. Someone who has heard my voice a few times will, upon hearing it again, pick up on the specific harmonic content and associate it with the memory of the previous times, even if I were speaking at different loudness or in a different mood.

Consider also that the emotive respones to major and minor chords may be learned responses, specific to certain cultures.

Whether or not certain historical figures had similar harmonic patterns, I'm not so sure, but they certainly used other aspects of speech to ellicit emotional responses in their audience, like prosody, as mentioned above. They also may have utilised up and coming broadcast technologies to allow their messages to be sent with higher fidelity than before, as radio and microphone technologies certainly improved in the 1930s.

Hello Sinem Atis

please check the resources related to your topic

www.rwth-aachen.de › ... › Before Your Studies › Choosing a Course of Study

In these pages you can find some scripts that you can be useful

Regards

Ammar: For methodological tips on informant choice, as well as sampling and analysis of previously unrecorded languages, the Handbook of the IPA may be a good place to start:

The Journal of the IPA regularly publishes phonetic illustrations of previously unrecorded languages (vowels, consonants, prosody), and is dedicated to research on the phonetics of any language. Browsing a couple of journal issues will give you a few more tips:

You may even consider submitting to this journal an article on your findings about the vowel system of the language you’re working on, and/or a full illustration of its phonemic inventory? Instructions for contributions are here:

All best for your research

Madalena

You may find these books useful although quite old.

Lucile Charles & Annie-Claude Motron (2001). Phonetique Progressive du Francais avec 600 exercices. Paris: CLE International.

Lhote Elizabeth (1990). Le paysage sonore d'une langue, le francais. Hambourg: Buske Verlag.

Best wishes

Mainz, Germany

Dear Schroeder,

Thanks for your contributions here, which seem generally sound.

As for the "political" motivation of Webster's reforms of American spelling, these might also be regarded as more purely cultural. Certainly, it was important, especially in the early republic to be able to distinguish easily writings by Americans as contrasted with British writers.

It strikes me as parallel to the differences, say, between "standard German" in its German and Swiss varieties. They are pretty similar, though the differences tend to stand out. I am not sure I would say that the differences are primarily a political expression.

One question left unexamined is whether Webster's 19th-century reforms of American spelling actually facilitated something distinctive in general American pronunciation. But it strikes me that, e.g., "center" as contrasted with "centre" emphasizes the retention of the final "r." Right? The older British spellings are often hold-overs from Norman French or other French borrowings into English.

H.G. Callaway

Jorge is right ...

Something like ...

eng - BA-Naah-na (lengthened middle syllable, stressed first syllable)  

Fre - ba-na-Naah (lengthened and stressed last syllable) 

Trevor

A.C.Gimson - An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English

I am of the similar arguments above. Phonetics is difficult for most learners of English in Asian countries not only because they focus on English as a foreign language at  a later age but also learn it in a non immersion classroom . In addition, most students in these countries learn English as a third even fourth language after their mother tongues. For example, students in my province study English as a fourth language, that is, Acehnese (mother tongue), Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic, then English. Of course, they might be introduced to the last three languages at the same time and thus phonetically that is a big burden for them.

When related to the teaching of pronunciation, my simple suggestion is to avoid using the terms such as bilabial stop, interdental fricative, and alveolar ridge even though learners can memorize the terms and label the sounds well. Rather  we should focus on practical aspect, that is, being able to pronounce English words correctly. Using authentic English movies will help.

Scientific knowledge of phonetics and phonology only become a necessity if students are prepared for future English language teachers.

Linguistics and literature can go together. In my view, systemic functional linguistics can be incorporated with literature and the approach will increase students' interest in both fields. 

Above all, I agree with Ladd that without strong conscious or unconscious knowledge of phonetics, no one can speak good English. And, if I may add, without being fed on good literature, students will be brutal.

You may well find this kind of comparative information in : 't Hart, Collier & Cohen (2006). A perceptual study of intonation. An experimental-phonetic approach to speech melody. Cambridge: University Press. This approach has applied the same analysis method to different languages (Dutch, English, German, Russian) so that there is potential for sensible comparison.

1) Words are generally word in context: this means that they are surrounded by other sounds, that generally influence the way in which they are performed, even by the same speaker.

2) Speech accomodation (see Giles's works): it has been demonstrated that speakers tend to mimic the prosodic & phonetic features of their conversational counterpart. This means that we change the way we utter a word according to whom we are speaking with.

3) Social cognition: close to the previous point, but slightly different. Thanks to our interactional ability (that is, the "social" variant of the linguistic ability), we are able to modulate our way to produce sounds. We all know when is appropriate or inappropriate to yell, to whisper and which effect may produce shortening or strenghtening sounds.

As for the "pure" acoustic reasons, I think it may be useful to think of speech as a motor action, that needs a coordinate effort of muscles and complex inputs from the primary motor cortex to be performed, exactly as throwing a ball: is the way you throw a ball always the same, and will the ball always fall in the same place? No. Similarly, the action "pronouncing the word: apple" may yield different outcomes.

Dear Dr Ravikumar,

My observations in Hong Kong and Singapore are that universities have now taken a very corporate model where students are customers. Phonetics is a very hard subject that straddles both the arts and the sciences, but because it is often associated with Language (normally codified as an Arts subject), the customer-students in the arts find themselves in an uncomfortable zone of trying to learn about scientific things they feel poor at. A downward spiral begins when these customer-students from the Arts pressure the curriculum to be more popular-oriented rather than educationally-oriented, to which the corporate university reacts.

I know there are good teachers, but good teachers have their jobs threatened by the customer-student dynamics.

Best,

Lian-Hee

Check out the prosodylab aligner by Kyle Gorman and Michael Wagner

Info and tutorial here:

code on github:

Dear Rebekah,

I've found this information that might be useful.

R. Mougeon &  É. Beniak (dir.), 1994. Les origines du français au Québec. Québec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval.  

You can read it at:

(see also the table of contents in the document for further references).

There is also this website titled:

DIACHRONIC SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH ON THE EVOLUTION OF VARIATION IN QUEBEC AND EUROPEAN FRENCH

With reference such as:

Poirier, C. 1975. La prononciation québécoise ancienne d'après les graphies d'un notaire du XVIIe s. Dans M. Juneau & G. Straka (dir.). Travaux de linguistique québécoise, vol. 1. Québec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 193-256.

I hope this helps.

With best wishes,

Jose A. Mompean

Dear Jose,

You might have a look the article on the /r/ sound by following the link below:

Hope you find it useful! 

Ali. 

Stephen, that's really cool stuff! Thanks. 

The language plays a very important role. It may help you to search for language depentent studies. Reading in German, Italien and Spanish is much easier compared to Frensh or English.

Dear Carlos Ariel Ferrer-Riesgo,

Thank you for the ideas.

I tried resampling the sound at 8 kHz and calculating  the integrals in the spectral domain. Though I received lower values than before, they are still orders of magnitude higher than those reported in the Fukazawa paper (they actually sampled at 20 kHz).

I still don't know what's going on, and, at this point, I don't think I'll use that measure in my study.

Interesting but complex questions! Without going into any of them directly, I would like to mention an unpublished (and now lost, alas!) paper I wrote on the ability of a speaker who made the COT:CAUGHT distinction regularly and natively, to distinguish it after having lived among speakers who lacked it. The surprising result (to me) was that the speaker failed to recognize the distinction when listening to recorded word lists. I am sure that I have seen this point documented elsewhere, but I don't recall where just now. The moral is that what happens in production does not necessarily always mirror what occurs in reception. (Sometimes the result runs the other way: the hearer recognizes the distinction in the speech of others, but does not produce it -- pointing to the hazards of making internal psycholinguistic inferences based on external events.)

    --Rudy

I'm tempted to say that abbreviations are only useful (in phonology as elsewhere) if one remembers what they mean. Oops, I said it! Please bear with me, formalisms are so pedantic ...

1. Pankaj's formulation says nothing about word-initial position. The rules can apply anywhere within a word, initially or not, provided that the context terminates at a word-final boundary.

2. The rule

A→B/_

actually means that A is replaced by B everywhere (whether there is a word boundary or not). But Pankaj's formulation implies simply

A→B#

which means that A is replaced by B only before a word boundary (forgetting the other rules for a moment).

3. The full resolution of Pankaj's formulation

A → B / (C)__(D)(E)#

is the following set of 8 rules (i.e. 2^3 rules, as there are 3 binary options):

CADE# → CBDE#

CAD# → CBD#

CAE# → CBE#

CA# → CB#

ADE# → BDE#

AD# → BD#

AE# → BE#

A# → B#

This means that I have to revise my previous comments, as I had ignored the word boundary in the formulation. The solution is neither sound (in that it generates unwanted items) nor complete (in that it only generates contexts which contain a word-final boundary). In contrast, the original rule apply whatever follows, i.e. whether there is a word-final boundary or not (since no word boundary is specified in the rules).

4. Interestingly, in a context CADE, application of the rules is indeterminate: either of the following original rules can apply:

CAD → CBD

ADE → BDE

In each case, the output would be CBDE.

If the two rules had different rule changes, e.g. if the second of these two were

ADE → GDE

it would mean that a principle of rule ordering would be needed in order to decide whether the output should be CBDE or CGDE. Since the output is the same in each case in the given example, the ordering is irrelevant and the rules can be said to be unordered.

Next challenge: find a real language to which rules with comparable structural descriptions and structural changes apply! :)

I have used Praat but principally for spectral analysis and measurements. Your case is pretty difficult because the language you are working on may not be documented and therefore the sounds (phonemes) involved may not be IPA compatibles. Besides, even if you find a software that does it, please take the warning from Ladefoged who asserted that instruments are only a help, but the final arbiter in all phonetic judgement is the trained ear of a phonetician. Regardless of the size of the data you have to transcribe, you will find that you are assured of the best results doing it manually. Even if you use a software, you'll still need to listen and ensure that the software had done its job. But if you are working on a language whose phonemic units you are not conversant with,, I would be scared to think that you can get a machine to do the work. Good luck. .

Instruments that assess quality of life allow the measurement of the individual's perception about effect of an illness on their personal, social and professional relations .Somtimes a sigle tool like V-RQOL  many not be sufficient to assess the impact specific illnessess as  it is has been observed V-RQOL  has  lot  of significace in the assessment of patients following thyroplasty for unilateral vocal cord paralysis but not significant  in assessment alayngeal population So multiparameters like V-RQOL, VHI, VAPP can be used  for individuals with different vocal problems

The tool "Prosogram" could perform an automatic segmentation into local peaks in the intensity of the band-pass filtered speech signal. The tool does not need a labeled corpus. Yet, even if I have used several times, I do not know its accuracy when making an automatic segmentation without labels. You can try. 

1. There is a follow-up to this paper that extends the methods to continuous speech rather than the sustained vowels that were used in the 1994 paper: 

Hillenbrand, J.M., and Houde, R.A. (1996). “Acoustic characteristics of breathy vocal quality: Dysphonic voices and continuous speech,” Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 39, 311-321.

The methods are described in somewhat more detail.

2. Software for the CPP-S measure that is described in this paper can be downloaded here:

  http://homepages.wmich.edu/~hillenbr/

Look for these links:

  cpps.exe (right click and choose "Save target as"); Readme file

The 'readme' file gives the basics for using the software.

It seems that a post-consonantal obstruent will either appear syllable/word-finally which is usually the context for devoicing and not voicing or it will be syllabified as an onset in which voiceless consonants will be aspirated in many languages. In other words, the context for voicing is not available. I do however have dissimilation examples from Persian, examples such as /goftan/> [gofdam] 'I said' and /biskuyit/ > [bisguyit].

Dear Jessica, there are many different phonological processes, so you have to be more specific in your question to get help from people in RG. 

Dear Anna,

I agree with the other contributions that there is a complex interplay of factors in speech perception and in particular in Second Language Acquisition research. The issue of individual differences is therefore very interesting; Antje Meyer at the MPI in Nijmegen has her research focus on individual differences in speech processing - you also might find some publications there (for instance an edited book by Leah Roberts and Antje Meyer (2012) on Individual Differences in Second Language Learning, published by Wiley: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-111848634X.html).

If I understand your question correctly, you have a group of participants (or more groups) that behaved in a particular way and you would like to make a statement for the group (or groups) as a whole. One option would be to inspect the 95% confidence interval for each participant individually (calculated from the different trials that the participants gave responses to). That would give you a first indication on the differences across participants in your group(s). 

Best,

Bettina

To my surprise, I also did not find other studies on British English. There are quiet some (and early) ones on American English though. Here I list the earliest ones I have come across. Maybe they will help a little bit. Ah... I don't know.

Does anyone know some references on the difference between British and American stops? That would also help I guess.

Lisker, L. (1957). Closure duration and the intervocalic voiced-voiceless distinction in English. Language, 33(1), 42-49.

Lisker, L., & Abramson, A. S. (1964). A cross-language study of voicing in initial stops: acoustical measurements. Word, 20(3), 384–422.

Lisker, L., & Abramson, A. S. (1967). Some effects of context on voice onset time in English stops. Language and speech, 10(1), 1–28.

Lisker, L. (1972). Stop duration and voicing in English. Valdman, Papers in linguistics and phonetics to the memory of Pierre Delattre, 339–343.

Lisker, L. (1975). Is it VOT or a first-formant transition detector. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 57(6), 1547–1551.

Lisker, L., Liberman, A. M., Erickson, D. M., Dechovitz, D., & Mandler, R. (1977). On pushing the voice-onset-time (VOT) boundary about. Language and speech, 20(3), 209.

Diehl, R. (1976). Feature analyzers for the phonetic dimensionstop vs. continuant. Perception & Psychophysics, 19(3), 267-272. doi: 10.3758/bf03204180

Lisker, L. (1978). In qualified defense of VOT. Language and speech, 21(4), 375.

Best, C. T., McRoberts, G. W., & Goodell, E. (2001). Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener's native phonological system. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109(2), 775-794.

Antoniou, M., Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D. (2013). Focusing the lens of language experience: Perception of Ma'di stops by Greek and English bilinguals and monolinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(4), 2397-2411.

Try with "strcat"

Perhaps the "Zhuan Zhu" 转注, from traditional "Liu Shu" 六书, could be used  to understand the structure of these characters. There are not necessary to treat the characters as a combination of phonetic and semantic parts. It's kinda like Zhi Shi指事, making difference by adding a stroke, but in Zhuan Zhu, or in the cases you mentioned, the new created scripts are as well phonetically related to the original ones.  

We have a recent article in Teaching Linguistics that might be useful to you: A tactile IPA magnet board system: a tool for blind and visually-impaired students in phonetics and phonology classrooms.  

As far as i know, a trend of eclecticism in teaching started to develop in the 1980s and the early 1990s, initiated by Sweet and Palmer. They believed that a good method is an eclectic one which requires the teacher to utilize her/his knowledge of language besides her/his experience in psychology. Based on Palmer's multiple line of approach, an eclectic method adopts every good idea and leaves the door open for future developments.

However, the term post-method is recently being used in language teaching circle to represent a seemingly new idea. It argue that teachers are not to imprison themselves and their students in any method, even in an eclectic one. It enables teachers to construct classroom-oriented theories of practice. In other words, the post-method condition gives the authority to teachers to make decisions and generate innovative techniques specific to their own classroom (Rashtchi, 2002).

Through this, post-method condition tries to search for an alternative to method rather than alternative method.