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Infants' learning of novel segments is modulated by prosody
Chládková, Kateřina ; Podlipský, V.J. ; Nudga, Natalia ; Paillereau, Nikola ; Kynčlová, Kateřina ; Šimáčková, Š.
Young infants recognize atypical realisations of native-language speech. Later they learn words better from native-accented talkers. However, 6-month-olds preferentially listen to unfamiliar speech. We tested whether the learning of new vowels matches 6-month-olds’ listening preferences, being more effective from nonnative-accented speech. We exposed Czech six-month-olds to delexicalised utterances with consonants replaced by [f] and vowels by 405 tokens sampled from a bimodal [ɛ]-[æ] distribution, a contrast absent from Czech, and with either native or atypical rhythm. Discrimination of [ɛ]-[æ] was then tested in an alternating/non-alternating paradigm. Longer first-look duration to non-alternating than to alternating trials – indicating a learning effect – was found in infants familiarised with the novel contrast in atypical rhythm, such effect was not\ndetected after familiarisation with native rhythm. Six-month-olds thus more effectively exploit distributional information about novel vowels from non-native rhythm, which matches their previously reported preferences for listening to novel over familiar accents.
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Imitation of the Russian accent by Czech speakers
Nudga, Natalia ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Bořil, Tomáš (referee)
(in English) Foreign accent imitation is one of the strategies used in intentional voice disguise. This thesis focuses on imitation of the Russian accent in Czech language by Czech speakers and describes the imitated accent based on auditory and acoustic analysis. Both segmental and suprasegmental features of speech have been analysed based on the comparison of audio recordings of regular speech and speech with imitated Russian accent. The most frequent difference implemented by Czech speakers during the imitation task involved the change of duration of vowels in relation to the position of word stress and included both lengthening of stressed vowels and shortening of unstressed ones. Change of vowel quality has been performed mostly on the vowel [ɪ], resulting in a close vowel [i] or resembling [ɨ]. Consonantal deviations usually concerned Czech sounds [ɦ] and [r̝ ], and palatalization of lateral consonant [l]. Audio recordings of Czech imitators as well as Russian speakers were used in the perception test, in which participants had to judge the authenticity of foreign accent. Four out of ten imitators were rated by the majority of listeners as genuine non-native speakers, whereas two out of five Russian speakers were misjudged for imitators. The accent of successful imitators was characterised by...
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Typology of mistakes made by Russian-speaking foreign students in written communication
Nudga, Natalia ; Stárková, Zuzana (advisor) ; Vučka, Tomáš (referee)
The bachelor thesis deals with the typology of interference errors of students, whose native language is Russian, and analyses the texts of respondents who have achieved B1and B2 level according to the CEFR which are available online in MERLIN corpus. After a brief introduction to the issue of interlingual interference and an overview of the selected differences between Czech and Russian, which are the source of interference errors, the results of the error analysis are presented. Errors are divided into categories and classified by the frequency of occurrence, and statistical data are compared between B1 and B2 level respectively.
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