Discourse prosody planning in native (L1) and nonnative (L2) (L1-Bengali) English: a comparative study (original) (raw)
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An initial investigation of L1 and L2 discourse speech planning in English
2010 7th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, 2010
A perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework was used in this study to investigate similarities and differences in the size and strategy of discourselevel speech planning across L1 and L2 English speaker groups. While both groups appear to produce similar configurations of acoustic contrasts to signal discourse boundaries, L1 speakers were found to produce these cues more robustly in English. Differences were also found between L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups with respect to the distribution of prosodic break levels and break locations. These differences in L1 and L2 organization of discourse speech prosody in English can be largely attributed to between-group differences in speech planning and chunking strategies whereby L2 speakers use more intermediate chunking units and fewer larger-scale planning units in their prosodic discourse organization. Through more understanding of prosody transfer, we believe that technology developed on the basis of L1 Mandarin spoken language processing may be applied to L2 English produced by the same speaker population, with little modification.
Discourse Prosody Planning in L 1 and L 2 English
2010
L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin discourselength English speech data extracted from the TWNAESOP corpus was analyzed using a perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework in order to investigate similarities and differences in the organization of discourse-level speech planning in English across L1 (native) and L2 (non-native) speaker groups. While both groups appear to produce similar configurations of acoustic contrasts to signal discourse units and boundaries, L1 speakers were found to produce these cues more robustly. Between-group differences in discourse units were also found through the distribution of prosodic break levels and break locations. These findings can be attributed to the size and scope of speech planning and chunking, whereby L2 speakers, possibly due to on-line processing limitations in L2, use more intermediate chunking units and fewer larger-scale planning units in prosodic discourse organization. Future cross-L1 comparisons will inves...
English speech of L1 English and L1 Bengali speakers of the same discourse is analyzed by applying hierarchical discourse prosody framework HPG (Hierarchy of Prosodic Phrase Group) in order to find the between-and within group similarities and differences in speech planning of L1 (native) and L2 (non-native) English speakers for prosodic organization at discourse level. The analysis reveals that the speech rate of L1 speakers is higher than speech rate of L2 speakers; L2 speakers contain more break boundary than that of the L1 speakers at every discourse prosodic level in the organization, which exhibit the fact that L2 speakers use more intermediate chunking units and larger scale planning units than that of L1 speakers. Between-group differences are also found through the analysis of phrase component at prosodic phrase level (PPh) and accent component at prosodic word level (PW). These findings can be attributed to L2 speakers’ improper phrasing, improper word level prominence and ambiguous difference between content words and function words in discourse prosodic organization.
Prosodic features at discourse boundaries of different strength
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1997
This paper presents the design and the evaluation of a method to study prosodic features of discourse structure in unrestricted spontaneous speech. Past work has indicated that one of the major difficulties that discourse prosody analysts have to overcome is finding an independent specification of hierarchical discourse structure as to avoid circularity. Previous studies have tried to solve this problem by constraining the discourse or by basing segmentations on a specific discourse theory. The current investigation first explores the possibility of experimentally determining discourse boundaries in unrestricted speech. In a next stage, it is investigated to what extent boundaries obtained in this way correlate with specific prosodic variables: the features pause, pitch range, and type of boundary tone are studied as a function of discourse structure.
International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2020
In the modern EFL paradigm, pre-task planning time is viewed as a norm. Pre-task planning time is one of the central concerns of teachers, test-developers, as well as researchers. Pre-task planning is planning a speech before performing a task, and it also involves rehearsal and strategic planning. The paper addresses the problem of pre-task planning advisability for A2 Russian EFL speakers. The research presented in this paper examines the structure, breakdown, repair, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity as well as the accuracy of the discourse produced by 145 Russian participants of the English language competition held in Kazan, Russia, in January 2020. The discourse analysis revealed that the pre-task time is used by A2 EFL speakers not only to focus on a dialog but also to elicit a topic text from memory, thus focusing on form rather than meaning. Hence, in A2 tests prioritizing meaning over form and measuring the ability for spontaneous speech, the one-minute pre-task planning time is viewed as questionable
PROSODY AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURE: ISSUES AND EXPERIMENTS
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