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Acoustic properties of schwa in Czech English and its relation to spelling
Hrabánek, Patrik ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Hubáčková, Iva (referee)
and key words The aim of this thesis is to explore the acoustic features of the schwa vowel in the speech of Czech speakers of English and its relation to spelling. The theoretical part introduces the schwa vowel and describes its phonetic and phonemic features in English. The main differences between the word-medial and the word-final schwa are then explained. Topics of word stress, speech rhythm and vowel reduction are discussed in order to show the systematic appearance of schwa in connected speech. In the empirical section the methodology and the results with discussion of the study can be found. The analysis of eight female speakers, six of which were native speakers of Czech, shows that Czech schwas generally display higher variation in formant values of the first two formants in all environments when compared to native speakers of English. The greatest difference in formant variation between the two groups was found in word-initial schwas, suggesting that Czech speakers tend to overgeneralize English pronunciation rules. When it comes to semantic function, both lexical and grammatical words showed higher variation in the Czech group. In terms of spelling, the greatest difference between the two groups was found in words in which the grapheme o is canonically realized as a schwa. The results...

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4 Hrabánek, Pavel
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