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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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Comparison of English and Russian phonetic system
Turova, Maria ; Konečný, Jakub (advisor) ; Rozboudová, Lenka (referee)
ANNOTATION: The thesis is exclusively allocated to a contrastive analysis of phonetic systems of English and Russian language. The given text is divided into two parts: the first one focuses on the theoretical description of main phonetic phenomena, that are characteristic for the languages; and the second one concentrates on the comparison of two languages based on the previously described features. The first chapter of this thesis is dedicated to individual phonemes - vowels, consonants and aspects of connected speech such as assimilation, assibilation, and elision. The second chapter focuses on prosodic features of the languages such as a syllable, stress, vowel reduction, syntagmatic division, and intonation. The following practical part wholly mirrors the structure of the theoretical part, which enables the contrastive analysis to be more transparent. The main aspiration of the thesis is to discover differences and similarities in phonetics and phonology between the two languages. The particular endeavor of this work was not only to list the differences between languages but also to unearth plausible errors and its causes while learning these languages as foreign.
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Role of Schwa in Word Stress Perception
Juránková, Martina ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (advisor) ; Bojarová, Marie (referee)
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to assess the role of schwa as the main representative of vowel reduction in the perception of English word stress. The research tool will be a perception test consisting of three groups of three to five syllable words. The individual categories will be differentiated from each other by the position of the sound schwa placed either before or after the syllable carrying the primary stress or it will not occur near the stressed syllable at all. Three groups of participants (Czech primary-school, secondary-school and university students) will be asked to mark the main stress in selected items. We hypothesize that the identification of stressed parts will be facilitated by the presence of schwa in the immediate vicinity of stressed syllables.
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