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Structural and temporal attributes of consonantal intervals in pre-school children
Kropíková, Alena ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Studenovský, David (referee)
The aim of this diploma thesis is to describe the realizations of consonant clusters in an age- homogenous group of Czech-speaking children. The theoretical part of this thesis deals with the syllable and consonant clusters as language universals, as well as with the syllable structure and consonant clusters in Czech. Furthermore, some theories of speech acquisition which take combinations of segments and forming of syllable structure in children's speech into account are also presented. A number of studies in consonant cluster acquisition is also summarized. The practical part of this work consists of an experiment in which consonant clusters in 16 typically developing Czech children aged 3;8-4;9 ( x = 4,4) were analysed. Eleven various two-element consonant clusters were selected according to their frequency of occurrence in the corpus of written Czech. Clusters were placed in 30 real words and 30 pseudowords - the pseudowords had the same structure as real words. Imitation was used as a elicitation method. Pictures were used only as complementary elements. The entire sample consisted of 461 consonant clusters realized in real words and 464 clusters realized in pseudowords. We described the structure of the target consonant clusters (i.e. manner and quality/accuracy of realizations) and their...
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Temporal accuracy of speech imitation in two age groups of children
Prachová, Pavla ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Palková, Zdena (referee)
The goal of this thesis was to test the ability of speech imitation in terms of temporal accuracy in two age groups of children. The first age group comprised 8 girls and 8 boys at the age of 10 to 11 years; the second group consisted of 8 girls and 8 boys at the age of 12 to 13 years. For the purpose of the experiment a perception-production test was created - it consisted of six, nine and twelve syllabic declarative sentences which contained two, three and four trisyllabic stress- groups. The task of the participating children was to repeat the sentences in three manners: in exactly the same words as they had heard them, and then by using the syllable /na/ and /ba/. Even though the children were able to meet the task, in some cases deviations occurred, such as deformations of the sentences in a certain way. Accuracy of imitation was investigated through average deviations from the model sentences. Based on the obtained values we identified the factors of length and composition of the task items and also the manner and order of imitation. We were also interested whether age and gender of respondents affect the accuracy of imitation. Key words speech rhythm, tempo, duration, stress-group, average deviation, imitation, children
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Marriage duration specific fertility trends
Přibil, Martin ; Rychtaříková, Jitka (advisor) ; Šídlo, Luděk (referee)
Marriage duration specific fertility trends Abstract The aim of this Master thesis is to describe the development of the marital fertility in the Czech Republic with focus on the analysis of the period between the marriage and the birth of child of a given order in the current marriage. It shows trends in the marital fertility in the time period between 1974 and 2011from transverse and longitudinal view. Using selected indicators the thesis describes different development of the marital fertility in the given period, which is closely connected with the distinct social and demographic situation in the Czech Republic prior and after the year 1989. In the whole monitored period the number of marriages is decreasing significantly. There was a significant increase both in a number and ratio of the children born alive outside of marriage, and on the opposite, decrease in the number and ratio of children born alive within the marriage. Within the framework of the current marriages substantial changes of the reproductive behavior occurred with an obvious breaking point in 1989. Since that time significant decrease in number of children, both in total and in the number of children of a given order has started. At the same time significant prolongation of the period between the start of marriage and birth of a child...
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Phone durations in multi-syllable words with Czech analogues in Czech English
Růžek, Jan ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Skarnitzl, Radek (referee)
This diploma thesis examines the foreign accent of Czech speakers in English. We focus on the factor of phone duration, which relates to both segmental and prosodic levels of phonetic description and is one of the correlates of prosodic prominence and speech rhythm. 84 words were selected from the texts avaible in the Prague Phonetic Corpus that have analogues in the loanword lexicon of Czech. Pronunciations of these words by native speakers (professional radio reporters) were compared with productions by Czech university students. The students were recorded prior to atteding a course in English phonetics. Based on our observations of durational patterns, we infer some plausible tendencies to be expected in Czech production of English. As durational interference from Czech into English has up to this date been a relatively unresearch domain, the present study adopts a qualitative research methodology. Keywords: Duration, Foreign Accent, Czech English, Interference 6
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Durational variation of segments in read speech of Czech and British speakers of English
Urbanová, Darina ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Studenovský, David (referee)
The study focuses on durational variation of segments in read speech of Czech and British speakers of English. The variation in segmental duration was examined in the speech of three Czech and three British speakers with respect to individual vowel and consonant categories. Furthermore, stress and intonation phrase boundary were explored as possible factors influencing segmental duration. The theoretical part of the study focuses on two main topics. The first is foreign accent with regard to accentedness, intelligibility and comprehensibility as well as in connection to its implications and factors which might influence its degree. The second part contains theoretical background about the time domain of speech concerning segmental duration in Czech and English, the area of rhythm, the importance of durational cues in perception and a short survey of factors reported to affect segmental duration. Czech accent in English and the importance of duration in foreign language are also covered. In the empirical part of the study, Czech speakers were found to miss the appropriate proportions between individual vowel categories and realize their long vowels as slightly too short. They lacked an adequate degree of durational contrast in stressed and unstressed vowels when compared to the British speakers. With regard...
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Acoustic properties of word stress in read Czech English
Liska, Jan ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Skarnitzl, Radek (referee)
key words: Czech English, foreign accent, word stress, word accent, stressed syllable, duration, f0, acoustic cues. This study investigates the acoustic properties of word stress in Czech English. The notion of foreign accent is introduced and its drawbacks are presented. Further on the various influences on the perceived degree, or strength, of foreign accent are discussed. Faulty realization of word stress is identified as one of the factors that contribute to unintelligibility of non-native speech (Benrabah, 1997; Hahn, 2004; Cutler, 1984). In Chapter 2 we compare the results of studies that used speakers of a variety of languages and form a basic theory on the acquisition of acoustic cues to word stress. We are mostly interested in f0 and duration. This theory, based on the feature hypothesis (McAllister et al., 2002 in Lee, Guion & Harada, 2006), states that languages that have a similar stress system to that of English (Dutch, Arabic) use their native cues to signal word stress, while non-contrastive languages (Vietnamese, Czech) prefer cue/s that are phonologically active on segmental level in their native language. Speakers of Vietnamese, a tone language, were found to prefer f0 over duration (Nguyen, 2003), so for Czech, a language that uses phonological vowel duration, it is expected that...
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Rhythmic differences between Welsh English and the British standard
Hejná, Michaela ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The present thesis deals with rhythmic differences between Welsh English and the British Standard. It focuses on the varieties spoken in Cardiff and Aberystwyth in particular. The first part of the theoretical chapter summarises the approaches towards rhythm from the physiological, acoustic, perceptual, and phonological perspectives. The second part provides a basic description of the British Standard, Welsh, and Welsh English. It concerns itself with the existing information related to the subject matter especially as regards Welsh varieties of English. The last, third part, serves as an overview of the most common approaches towards the search of the acoustic correlates of rhythm (%V, ∆C, ∆V, PVI, varco, RR, YARD). The following chapters of the thesis present a material based study of the data obtained for the purposes of the thesis. The segmentation was carried out according to the principles proposed by Machač and Skarnitzl 2009. Rhythm was measured for four respondents for each selected location of Wales. The age span was 35-39 years for the group from Cardiff and 29-39 for that from Aberystwyth. The values measured were compared with the research of Volín and Pollák from 2009, which, among other things, provided the results of the rhythmic values for %V and ∆C for the British Standard on the...
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Acoustic properties of monosyllabic words in semi-spontaneous dialogues and read speech
Ondrušková, Lucie ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Machač, Pavel (referee)
This thesis investigates temporal characteristics of monosyllabic words (je, se, že) in semi-spontaneous dialogues and read speech. Our material consisted of two sets of recordings from six speakers (three men and three women). The speakers read a text first, and this reading was followed by a recording of a spontaneous dialogue. We investigated differences of temporal characteristics of monosyllabic words between the two types of speech. In addition, we also examined how these characteristics are affected by different variables, which included: position in a stress group, presence of stress, presence of pause and speaker's personality. It was found that the type of speech had a significant influence on duration ratio of sounds in examined words je, že. Word se remained unaffected by the type of speech and generally appeared as a very stable element. The type of speech also influenced variability in duration - this variability proved to be higher in spontaneous speech. The type of speech did not affect average duration of words je, se, že. Position in the stress group also proved to have a significant effect on duration of words. This effect was mainly caused by words which created isolated stress groups - words in such position had longer duration than words in other positions. For words je, se...
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Plosives in Czech: temporal characteristics and variability in realization
Šimek, Jaroslav ; Machač, Pavel (advisor) ; Zíková, Magdalena (referee)
The aim of this diploma thesis is to closely investigate and describe selected phonetic properties of Czech oral plosives [p t ť k b d ď g] in normal speech. The re- search focuses mostly on temporal characteristics in various contexts; moreover, we deal with the possible manners of plosive articulation in Czech, including non-canonical realizations. Another important part of the present study is a comparison with earlier studies. In the domain of temporal characteristics we examine the influence of various contexts on phone duration. The contexts include: phonetic context, speaker gender, the position of the plosive in the stress unit or articulation rate. We also examine a possible connection between the duration of the plosive and its realization. In the part that deals with the manner of articulation we focus on the individual phonetic properties, for which we investigate especially the conditions and degree of their stability. Furthermore we describe the specific plosive articulations in certain pho- netic contexts and some alternative realizations of certain plosives. The speech material used is mostly spontaneous. All the speakers are non- professionals from various TV broadcasts. Keywords: plosives, duration, phone segmentation, phonetic properties, pho- netic context, gender, articulation...
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