Using Explicit Instruction of the International Phonetic Alphabet System in English as a Foreign Language Adult Classes

<p style="text-align: justify;">The effects of international phonetic alphabet (IPA) instruction on English as a foreign language (EFL) adult learners’ pronunciation have been well-recognized. However, not many studies on the topic were conducted in the Vietnamese context. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate (1) the impact of IPA learning on Vietnamese EFL adult learners’ pronunciation and (2) adult learners’ perceptions of the effects of learning the IPA system on their pronunciation. The study was designed as an experimental study, following a mixed-methods approach, using the pre-and-post-tests, questionnaires, and interviews to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Thirty-eight adult learners took part in this investigation; they were divided into two groups, nineteen in the control and nineteen in the experimental group. The experimental study lasted ten weeks before the questionnaires and interviews were administered with the participants in the experimental group. The results demonstrated a significant improvement in adult learners’ pronunciation in the experimental group. The participants in the experimental group also highly perceived the positive effects of learning the IPA system on their pronunciation. Pedagogical implications and suggestions were presented at the end of the paper.</p>

Abe Road: Kuwata Keisuke’s Beatles Parody

In May 2009, when the Japanese LDP government was in a weakened position, Kuwata Keisuke, lead singer of popular rock band Southern All Stars, performed a parody of the Beatles’ Abbey Road on his weekly television show. Backed by a band performing an uncanny cover of the album, he rewrote the lyrics into commentary on corruption in Japanese politics, fiscal problems, the death penalty, and other political issues. This performance was highly unusual: Japanese recording artists rarely engage in politics. The recording and broadcast industries disallow lyrics on controversial topics, and management discourages artists from engaging in politics. Kuwata staged his rebellious gesture as a “mishearing” of a well-known album. Kuwata transformed Abbey Road into political parody through linguistic sleight of hand. Kuwata chose Japanese lyrics with similar vowels and consonants (as demonstrated by their proximities on the International Phonetic Alphabet) to make them sound like the original English lyrics. By presenting his acrid commentary as a parody of this much-loved album and thus framing it as humorous entertainment, Kuwata was able to publicly criticize Japanese politicians.

Investigating the Role of International Phonetic Alphabet to Enhance Highschool Students’ Pronunciation Skill

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has been used to provide a unique symbol for each distinctive sound in a language. The IPA has been widely utilized by linguists and dictionaries with modifications for easier identification. This study focuses on how IPA supports Indonesian EFL learners with their pronunciation practice particularly in senior high school context. The present study is qualitative literary research. First, the researcher collected the data from the questionnaire, second, the researcher identified them and make it into conclusion. The result of the analysis showed that students gave their positive perspective in using the IPA symbols as they believed it could enhance their oral skills and technique for learning pronunciation. Although IPA symbols were regarded as useful and easier to learn, several students thought positively of using the phonetic symbol in their learning, most of them felt it is difficult, since the phonetic symbols each had distinctive symbols resulting in students confused to remember and comprehend. This study implies that while the learning curve is high, students were quite motivated to learn English pronunciation through IPA.

Voicing of glottal consonants and non-modal vowels

Variation in voicing is common among sounds of the world’s languages: sounds that are analyzed as voiceless can undergo voicing, and those analyzed as voiced can devoice. Among voiceless glottal sounds in particular, voicing is widespread: linguists often expect the voiceless glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] to be fully voiced, especially between vowels. In this study, we use audio recordings from Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association to explore the extent to which glottal consonants and non-modal (breathy and creaky) vowels differ in terms of percentage voicing and voicing intensity in three phrasal positions. We find that voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ] in initial position. Between two vowels, both [h] and [ɦ] are as voiced as breathy vowels. Glottal stops and creaky vowels are both characterized by high percentages of voicing, but they differ in voicing intensity: in all phrasal positions, glottal stops generally have periods of strong and weak voicing, whereas creaky vowels are strongly voiced. In contrast, vowels described as ‘rearticulated’, ‘checked’, or ‘glottalized’ show similar drops in voicing intensity to glottal stops. We interpret these results through an articulatory lens: glottal consonants and non-modal vowels are both modulations in phonation resulting from laryngeal constriction and vocal fold spreading. We argue further that, because voicing during [ʔ] and [h] is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic constraints, many cases of [ʔ] and [h] can be considered phonetically underspecified for voicing.

Phonological Process in Toddlers’’ Single-Word Production: An Explorative Study of Alveolar Sounds in English

The production of phonological patterns is a very complicated process especially when alveolar consonant sounds are pronounced in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The toddlers ageing 2-3 years as well as the language handicaps find it more complicated to cope with this sound process. The present study on toddlers aims at investigating the alveolar consonant sounds in keeping with single word production. The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception by Jason Geller was implemented to investigate sound productions in the perspective of Substitution Process proposed by Burnthal and Rankson (2004). Non-probabilistic Sample of twenty-five toddlers was given 125 words; a five-word set to every toddler to pronounce repeating at least five times at the top of his voice the articulators at length. Data was collected by means of informants’ close observations. The comparison between the pronunciation of original words and that of produced words with their phonetic transcription provided evidence of the shift in alveolar sound patterns during the phonological process by the toddlers. The results implicated that the toddlers made good use of articulators with ease and without any special training. They simplified the complicated consonant sound patterns at their own convenience. The study will be equally beneficial for speech pathologists, linguistic scholars, and keen phonology learners.

The many writing systems of Mansi: challenges in transcription and transliteration

The paper at hand presents the recently published COPIUS Orthographic Toolset’s Mansi module. This open-source software, part of the COPIUS drive to create necessary international infrastructures for teaching/learning and researching Uralic languages, allows for rule-based transcription between four basic writing systems historically used for Mansi: the Cyrillic alphabet, the Latin-based Unified Northern Alphabet (UNA), Finno-Ugric Transcription (FUT), and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The software aims to take variation in the usage of these respective writing systems into consideration as best possible in a purely rule-based approach currently lacking lexical support. Section 1 will give a short summary of the history of Mansi literacy and aims to elucidate how changing trends, both local and Russia-wide, influenced the manner in which Mansi was captured in writing by scientists and speakers throughout history. Section 2 will give an overview of (Northern) Mansi phonology and discuss how difficult aspects of it are handled in the writing systems under consideration. Finally, Section 3 will illustrate the transcription software, in its current version, in action, with a sample text transcribed from each of the four writing systems under consideration into the three other ones.

ELEMENTARY INTRODUCTION TO PHONEMIC TRANSCIPTION

The main purpose of this book is to enhance standardized English vowel pronunciation among L2 learners through phonemic transcription materials. For achieving that particular goal, it was essential to do some literature review about Phonology, Phonemic and phonetic transcriptions. Later on, some materials and games have been analyzed and performed during authors’ classes. Having done so, the authors validated their materials and games, as possible techniques, for enhancing L2 learners’ pronunciation. Some linguists suggest that non- English speakers trained in the International Phonetic Alphabet could comprehend how to pronounce English phonemes accurately, and improve their listening and pronunciation skills respectively.

Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior

Most undeciphered lost languages exhibit two characteristics that pose significant decipherment challenges: (1) the scripts are not fully segmented into words; (2) the closest known language is not determined. We propose a decipherment model that handles both of these challenges by building on rich linguistic constraints reflecting consistent patterns in historical sound change. We capture the natural phonological geometry by learning character embeddings based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The resulting generative framework jointly models word segmentation and cognate alignment, informed by phonological constraints. We evaluate the model on both deciphered languages (Gothic, Ugaritic) and an undeciphered one (Iberian). The experiments show that incorporating phonetic geometry leads to clear and consistent gains. Additionally, we propose a measure for language closeness which correctly identifies related languages for Gothic and Ugaritic. For Iberian, the method does not show strong evidence supporting Basque as a related language, concurring with the favored position by the current scholarship. 1

Approaches for Multilingual Phone Recognition in Code-switched and Non-code-switched Scenarios Using Indian Languages

In this study, we evaluate and compare two different approaches for multilingual phone recognition in code-switched and non-code-switched scenarios. First approach is a front-end Language Identification (LID)-switched to a monolingual phone recognizer (LID-Mono), trained individually on each of the languages present in multilingual dataset. In the second approach, a common multilingual phone-set derived from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription of the multilingual dataset is used to develop a Multilingual Phone Recognition System (Multi-PRS). The bilingual code-switching experiments are conducted using Kannada and Urdu languages. In the first approach, LID is performed using the state-of-the-art i-vectors. Both monolingual and multilingual phone recognition systems are trained using Deep Neural Networks. The performance of LID-Mono and Multi-PRS approaches are compared and analysed in detail. It is found that the performance of Multi-PRS approach is superior compared to more conventional LID-Mono approach in both code-switched and non-code-switched scenarios. For code-switched speech, the effect of length of segments (that are used to perform LID) on the performance of LID-Mono system is studied by varying the window size from 500 ms to 5.0 s, and full utterance. The LID-Mono approach heavily depends on the accuracy of the LID system and the LID errors cannot be recovered. But, the Multi-PRS system by virtue of not having to do a front-end LID switching and designed based on the common multilingual phone-set derived from several languages, is not constrained by the accuracy of the LID system, and hence performs effectively on code-switched and non-code-switched speech, offering low Phone Error Rates than the LID-Mono system.