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Accuracy and fluency in the speech of the advanced learner of English
Gráf, Tomáš ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šebesta, Karel (referee) ; Betáková, Lucie (referee)
The thesis analyses the accuracy and fluency exhibited in the spoken advanced-learner English of Czech students of English philology. It draws its data from a learner corpus comprising fifty 15-minute interviews with these learners and from a parallel native-speaker corpus of forty-nine 15-minute interviews. As regards accuracy, the learner data is analysed using techniques of error analysis. Salient features of advanced learner English are identified and the subsequent quantitative analyses reveal that throughout the entire group of students (which is characterized by what revealed itself to be a wide proficiency span) two groups of error types are found to be much more frequent than any other, namely errors in the use of articles and tenses. For the fluency measurements a small selection of variables has been chosen to describe speed fluency (speech rate) and breakdown fluency (the frequency of unfilled and filled pauses), and the results are compared with those for the parallel native-speaker corpus. The analysed native speakers are found to produce speech at a generally much higher rate than the majority of the learners. There does not appear - at least in the light of the given sample - to be any direct correlation between fluency and the frequency of errors. Moreover, the learners are found...
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The tempo of speech in theatrical Czech during two periods separated by several decades
Bartošová, Petra ; Palková, Zdenka (advisor) ; Skarnitzl, Radek (referee)
The diploma thesis deals with the issue of speech rate. The theoretical part briefly describes the investigation of speech tempo. It defines the types of tempo examined in this study (articulation rate and modified speaking rate) and factors that influence the tempo of speech. The practical part of the thesis aims to ascertain whether speech rate on the stage has increased and whether it is influenced by the type of text (monologue, dialogue, monological dialogue). The material consists of four theatre productions (Lakomec from 1972 and 2004 and Naši furianti from 1979 and 2006). Therefore we do not investigate gradual changes within the given periods, but instead compare two pairs of productions of the same dramatic text, realized with a time interval of approximately 30 years. A linear mixed-effects model was used as the main method for statistical evaluation of results gathered by measuring the speech rate. The results show that neither articulation rate nor modified speaking rate changed significantly in the observed productions. Differences with some statistical significance were obtained for comparison of tempo in texts of differing type, specifically in texts of different line lengths. The results relate especially to articulation rate, lesser to modified speaking rate.
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Accuracy and fluency in the speech of the advanced learner of English
Gráf, Tomáš ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šebesta, Karel (referee) ; Betáková, Lucie (referee)
The thesis analyses the accuracy and fluency exhibited in the spoken advanced-learner English of Czech students of English philology. It draws its data from a learner corpus comprising fifty 15-minute interviews with these learners and from a parallel native-speaker corpus of forty-nine 15-minute interviews. As regards accuracy, the learner data is analysed using techniques of error analysis. Salient features of advanced learner English are identified and the subsequent quantitative analyses reveal that throughout the entire group of students (which is characterized by what revealed itself to be a wide proficiency span) two groups of error types are found to be much more frequent than any other, namely errors in the use of articles and tenses. For the fluency measurements a small selection of variables has been chosen to describe speed fluency (speech rate) and breakdown fluency (the frequency of unfilled and filled pauses), and the results are compared with those for the parallel native-speaker corpus. The analysed native speakers are found to produce speech at a generally much higher rate than the majority of the learners. There does not appear - at least in the light of the given sample - to be any direct correlation between fluency and the frequency of errors. Moreover, the learners are found...
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The tempo of speech in theatrical Czech during two periods separated by several decades
Bartošová, Petra ; Palková, Zdenka (advisor) ; Skarnitzl, Radek (referee)
The diploma thesis deals with the issue of speech rate. The theoretical part briefly describes the investigation of speech tempo. It defines the types of tempo examined in this study (articulation rate and modified speaking rate) and factors that influence the tempo of speech. The practical part of the thesis aims to ascertain whether speech rate on the stage has increased and whether it is influenced by the type of text (monologue, dialogue, monological dialogue). The material consists of four theatre productions (Lakomec from 1972 and 2004 and Naši furianti from 1979 and 2006). Therefore we do not investigate gradual changes within the given periods, but instead compare two pairs of productions of the same dramatic text, realized with a time interval of approximately 30 years. A linear mixed-effects model was used as the main method for statistical evaluation of results gathered by measuring the speech rate. The results show that neither articulation rate nor modified speaking rate changed significantly in the observed productions. Differences with some statistical significance were obtained for comparison of tempo in texts of differing type, specifically in texts of different line lengths. The results relate especially to articulation rate, lesser to modified speaking rate.
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Speaker identification in the temporal domain of speech
Weingartová, Lenka ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Skarnitzl, Radek (referee) ; Pollák, Petr (referee)
This thesis aims to thoroughly describe the temporal characteristics of spoken Czech by means of phone durations and their changes under the influence of several prosodic and segmental factors, such as position in a higher unit (syllable, word or prosodic phrase), length of the higher unit, segmental environment, structure of the syllable or phrase-final lengthening. The speech material comes from a semi-spontaneous corpus of scripted dialogues comprising 4046 utterances by 34 speakers. The descriptions are afterwards used for the creation of a rule-based temporal model, which provides a baseline for analysing local articulation rate contours and their speaker-specificity. The results indicate, that systematic speaker-specific differences can be found in the segmental domain, as well as in the temporal contours. Moreover, speaker identification potential of articulation rate and global temporal features is also assessed. Keywords: temporal characteristics, temporal modelling, phone duration, speaker identification, Czech
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