Phonological and Syntactic Problems faced by Speakers of Bafoussam-Bamileke as L1 in Learning English as L2

Carrying out this research on the difficulties encountered by Bafoussam-Bamileke's native speakers learning English as their L2 helps to unveil many syntactic and phonological problems that require a great interest no only to teachers but also to learners in order to reach an acceptable level of accuracy and fluency. We have also provided some ways to solve those problems efficiently.

A Comparative Study of English Word Order Acquisition by Elementary and Secondary School Pupils - Native Speakers of Serbian and Hungarian

Kitic investigated the phenomenon of English word order acquisition by Serbian and Hungarian speakers, examining both the theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon. She began by looking at language learning and language acquisition, viewing word order acquisition in the context of relevant linguistic and psycholinguistic knowledge. The main hypothesis of her empirical investigation was that the majority of word order mistakes in the language production of Serbian and Hungarian speakers of English is due to mother tongue interference. Three supporting hypotheses were introduced to specify the phenomenon of interference in its correlation to (1) language proficiency, (2) sentence patterns, and (3) optional adverbials. The conclusions were based on error analysis of 9280 sentences of 464 elementary and high school learners. The results showed that a learner's level of proficiency seems to be a relevant factor in mother tongue interference as this decreases with increased proficiency. Word order errors are however fossilised at the highest levels. The causes of interference errors, which increase with the number of sentence elements, are either absent sentence patterns or similar ones. In the case of adverbials, word order errors have two forms: interrelation (with canonical elements) and mixed adverbials.

Linkage in narratives: A comparison between monolingual speakers of French and Italian, and early and late French-Italian bilinguals

In the course of language acquisition learners have to deal with the task of producing narrative texts that are coherent across a range of conceptual domains (space, time, entities) -- both within as well as across utterances. The organization of information is analyzed in this study, on the basis of retellings of a silent film, in terms of devices used in the coordination and subordination of events within the narrative sequence. The focus on subordination reflects a core grammatical difference between Italian and French, as Italian is a null-subject language while French is not. The implications of this contrast for information structure include differences in topic management within the sequence of events. The present study investigates in how far Italian-French bilingual speakers acquire the patterns of monolingual speakers of Italian. It compares how early and late bilinguals of these two languages proceed when linking information in narratives in Italian.

Vocal tract settings in speakers suffering from obstructive sleep apnea síndrome

Automatic systems based on speech signal analysis for the early dete ction of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) have achieved fairly high performance rates in recent years. However, a satisfactory explanation of these results has not been available. This presentation aims at explaining via an examination of the long-term spectra of OSA patients and normal control speakers these systems’ ability to discover OSA speakers on the base of all-purpose cepstral coefficients. An in terpretation of the long- term spectra in terms of the underlying tract settings suggests that the speech of OSA patients is characterized by a pharyngeal narrowing that may be captured by acoustic cues of the spectral contour of windowed speech frames. A novel interpretation of long-term spectra in terms of the first principal component of the temporal sequence of short-term amplitude-spectra is also discussed.

Speech Signals Feature Extraction Model for a Speaker’s Gender and Age Identification System

Durante el proceso de producción de voz, los factores anatómicos, fisiológicos o psicosociales del individuo modifican los órganos resonadores, imprimiendo en la voz características particulares. Los sistemas ASR tratan de encontrar los matices característicos de una voz y asociarlos a un individuo o grupo. La edad y sexo de un hablante son factores intrínsecos que están presentes en la voz. Este trabajo intenta diferenciar esas características, aislarlas y usarlas para detectar el género y la edad de un hablante. Para dicho fin, se ha realizado el estudio y análisis de las características basadas en el pulso glótico y el tracto vocal, evitando usar técnicas clásicas (como pitch y sus derivados) debido a las restricciones propias de dichas técnicas. Los resultados finales de nuestro estudio alcanzan casi un 100% en reconocimiento de género mientras en la tarea de reconocimiento de edad el reconocimiento se encuentra alrededor del 80%. Parece ser que la voz queda afectada por el género del hablante y las hormonas, aunque no se aprecie en la audición. ABSTRACT Particular elements of the voice are printed during the speech production process and are related to anatomical and physiological factors of the phonatory system or psychosocial factors acquired by the speaker. ASR systems attempt to find those peculiar nuances of a voice and associate them to an individual or a group. Age and gender are inherent factors to the speaker which may be represented in voice. This work attempts to differentiate those characteristics, isolate them and use them to detect speaker’s gender and age. Features based on glottal pulse and vocal tract are studied and analyzed in order to achieve good results in both tasks. Classical methodologies (such as pitch and derivates) are avoided since the requirements of those techniques may be too restrictive. The final scores achieve almost 100% in gender recognition whereas in age recognition those scores are around 80%. Factors related to the gender and hormones seem to affect the voice although they are not audible.