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Production of weak forms of prepositions by non-native speakers of English
Kozáková, Tereza ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
This bachelor thesis aims to reveal and describe to which extent non-native speakers of English from different L1 backgrounds employ weak forms when producing prepositions. The theoretical part focuses on vowel reduction and its importance for the natural rhythm of English. This concept is further explored from the Lingua Franca Core perspective and its approach to teaching vowel reduction. In the practical part, the analysis of a series of recordings is carried out. The recordings were taken from the L2-ARCTIC speech corpus of non-native English (Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese). The purpose of the analysis is to explore whether and how speakers with different L1s reduce vowels in canonically weak forms of prepositions. The focus is placed on the quality and quantity of vowels in said prepositions and their duration with regard to their occurrence in either initial or medial positions. The average vowel duration is then compared to the referential vowel duration in General British. KEY WORDS ELF, prepositions, vowel duration, schwa, vowel reduction, weak forms
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Weak-form grammatical words in Czech speakers of English
Fuková, Kateřina ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
Adopting processes of connected speech into one's English pronunciation has proven challenging for EFL learners, and Czech speakers are no exception. The objective of the present thesis was to find, whether there is any connection between the level of pronunciation and ability to reduce grammatical words to their weak forms. The first section of this paper describes the contemporary understanding of speech rhythm and connected speech processes, and summarizes existing research in the field of acquisition of these pronunciation practices. In the empirical portion of this thesis, we analysed recordings of 20 native Czech speakers, all of which were women. Speakers were separated into 2 different groups according to their pronunciation capabilities. No general conclusions can be drawn from the evaluated material, as the groups showed many different tendencies. In some cases, the group with an ambiguous accent performed better than the group with a typically Czech accent and this tendency was never completely reversed. On many occasions, however, the groups behaved identically.
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