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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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The occurrence of the HW element in Welsh English
Kolísková, Barbora ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Šturm, Pavel (referee)
The aim of this diploma thesis is to investigate the accent realizations of the initial consonant in wh- words in Welsh English. The theoretical background of this study deals with the development of Welsh language and its interactions with the British standard variety. Together with the previously mentioned the phonological inventories of Welsh, RP, and Welsh English are described in the first part. We further analyzed the development of the <hw> element in the British Isles in general. The research part of this study is concerned with the analysis of the data from 20 speakers of Welsh English. Three speech styles were used for the final analysis: spontaneous speech (informal style), isolated words (formal style) and reading of Cinderella (formal style). Signal-to-noise ratio and voicing of the <hw> segments were measured in order to discover the occurrence and the nature of the <hw> element. The lowest levels of harmonicity were measured in segments that were obtained from the formal reading style. The highest levels were measures in the spontaneous speech tokens. Younger speakers showed higher levels of harmonicity than older speakers. The results of the male and the female participants were different in each type. In the spontaneous speech style the male speakers tended to have lower levels of...
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