The current study investigated how language context and word frequency influenced vowel perception of Chinese-Japanese cognates among Chinese learners of Japanese.Focusing on orthographic cognates,participants perform...The current study investigated how language context and word frequency influenced vowel perception of Chinese-Japanese cognates among Chinese learners of Japanese.Focusing on orthographic cognates,participants performed a vowel detection task on cognates,manipulating language context and target language(Chinese vs.Japanese),as well as word frequency(high vs.low).We measured reaction times,perceptual sensitivity,and response criterion.For high-frequency words,consistent language contexts facilitated faster vowel detection in both languages.However,in low-frequency conditions,participants showed higher perceptual sensitivity to Chinese targets and more conservative response criteria for Japanese targets,regardless of context.These findings revealed the complex interplay between word frequency,language dominance,and context in cross-language processing.Our study contributed to the understanding of vowel perception in languages with shared orthography but distinct phonological systems,offering insights for models of cross-language cognition and second language education.Furthermore,it highlighted the importance of considering both word frequency and language-specific features in cross-language studies.展开更多
This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant...This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant (CVVC). Even though there has been a dispute on the precise number of Arabic vowels that exist between language studies, this study used the opinion that the Arabic language has three vowels;the elongation of each vowel gave the other three because this is the opinion of classical Arabic linguists which is the source of the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Studies said that the first and second formant values (F1, F2) can represent the vowels. In this study, the formants were measured using LPC (Linear Predictive Coding), verifying the measurement to see if the measured follows the pattern of formants measurements of the other studies, and the formants were used to investigate the relationship between short and long vowels. Furthermore, the study figured out if the dialect of speakers can affect the values of formants, even if the spoken language is MSA, some statistical measurements were calculated to evaluate the relationship.展开更多
Korean characters consist of 2 dimensional distributed consonantal and vowel graphemes. The purpose of reducing the 2 dimensional characteristics of Korean characters to linear arrangements at early stage of character...Korean characters consist of 2 dimensional distributed consonantal and vowel graphemes. The purpose of reducing the 2 dimensional characteristics of Korean characters to linear arrangements at early stage of character recognition is to decrease the complexity of following recognition task. By defining the identification codes for the vowel graphemes of Korean characters, the rules for combination of vowel graphemes are established, and a recognition algorithm based on the rules for combination of vowel graphemes, is therefore proposed for vertical vowel graphemes. The algorithm has been proved feasilbe through demonstrating simulations.展开更多
The paper introduces the cardinal vowels system invented by the famous English phonetician Daniel Jones.This system enables a teacher to describe to his students a foreign vowel by comparing it with the nearest vowel ...The paper introduces the cardinal vowels system invented by the famous English phonetician Daniel Jones.This system enables a teacher to describe to his students a foreign vowel by comparing it with the nearest vowel in his mother tongue,which makes the learning of a foreign sound much easier to his students.Two cases of teaching Chinese students English vowels are taken as an example to illustrate the point.IPA cardinal vowel system is of use in terms of teaching and learning English.Two suggestions are put forward in the end.展开更多
The Vowel changes of English are more dramatic and complicated in every period of English development. Especially theGreat Vowel Shift from Middle English to Modern English influenced the whole English phonetic system...The Vowel changes of English are more dramatic and complicated in every period of English development. Especially theGreat Vowel Shift from Middle English to Modern English influenced the whole English phonetic system. This paper examines thevowel changes in each period of English development and aims at concluding the rules of the language change and development.展开更多
The aim of the article is to present results of research that was performed with 97 Polish students of the second and third year of English Philology. The purpose of the research is to examine how conscious manipulati...The aim of the article is to present results of research that was performed with 97 Polish students of the second and third year of English Philology. The purpose of the research is to examine how conscious manipulation of facial expressions aids acquisition of foreign vowels by learners, regardless of their native language and the culture they have been brought up in. Taking advantage of achievements derived from such disciplines as psychology of emotions and phonetics depicted as a physical process, an attempt is made to find a tool that improves teaching/learning of foreign vowels, that is to say, an effort is put in search of a useful method to make the phonetic process faster and more accurate. Teachers of English are encouraged to put the method, which is described in detail in the paper, into practice with their own mother languages and to share opinions about the method with colleagues. Similarly, it is believed that it can be applied to courses of other languages than just English. Teachers of those languages are encouraged to try to use it, too.展开更多
This paper aims at examining the perception of English tense and lax vowel contrasts by testing an identification task of CVC syllables with different manipulated durations in Chinese learners of English.This can prov...This paper aims at examining the perception of English tense and lax vowel contrasts by testing an identification task of CVC syllables with different manipulated durations in Chinese learners of English.This can provide some empirical evidence for English as a second language teachers in teaching second language pronunciation.展开更多
This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four ch...This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four children(two boys and two girls all 8 years old)equally from the two dialects of EkeGusii(EkeMaate and EkeRogoro Dialects).In order to capture the distribution characteristics of the vowel acoustic concentration,the group frequency means are normalized using Lobanov’s(1971)algorithm.Two viewpoints are the subjects of analysis in EkeGusii vowels:(a)acoustic vowel space as projected by the intersection of F2 vs.F1 or quadrilateral,and(b)spatial features of high,low,front and back.These qualities are mainly influenced by the physiology of speakers and social variability as occasioned by gender,age and dialect.The results indicate that children have no gender difference in formants,and have the highest frequencies for all formants,followed by adult females and then adult males.Furthermore,acoustic vowel space and spatial features are affected by gender,age,and dialect.A vowel pattern,replicated by all informants,is realized in the dispersion of the vowels within the chart influenced by gender and age.This study found out that EkeGusii seems to adopt a seven-vowel system of/i eɛaɔo u/with a length contrast.展开更多
The great gowel ghift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the 15th to 18th centuries. Based on the history and theory of great vowel shift, the thesis makes an investigation on the p...The great gowel ghift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the 15th to 18th centuries. Based on the history and theory of great vowel shift, the thesis makes an investigation on the principle, exceptions and effect of Great Vowel Shift.展开更多
The most sensitive Arabic text available online is the digital Holy Quran.This sacred Islamic religious book is recited by all Muslims worldwide including non-Arabs as part of their worship needs.Thus,it should be pro...The most sensitive Arabic text available online is the digital Holy Quran.This sacred Islamic religious book is recited by all Muslims worldwide including non-Arabs as part of their worship needs.Thus,it should be protected from any kind of tampering to keep its invaluable meaning intact.Different characteristics of Arabic letters like the vowels(),Kashida(extended letters),and other symbols in the Holy Quran must be secured from alterations.The cover text of the Quran and its watermarked text are different due to the low values of the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR)and Embedding Ratio(ER).A watermarking technique with enhanced attributes must,therefore,be designed for the Quran’s text using Arabic vowels with kashida.The gap addressed by this paper is to improve the security of Arabic text in the Holy Quran by using vowels with kashida.The purpose of this paper is to enhance the Quran text watermarking scheme based on a reversing technique.The methodology consists of four phases:The first phase is a pre-processing followed by the second phase-the embedding process phase—which will hide the data after the vowels.That is,if the secret bit is“1”,then the kashida is inserted;however,the kashida is not inserted if the bit is“0”.The third phase is the extraction process and the last phase is to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by using PSNR(for the imperceptibility)and ER(for the capacity).The experimental results show that the proposed method of imperceptibility insertion is also optimized with the help of a reversing algorithm.The proposed strategy obtains a 90.5%capacity.Furthermore,the proposed algorithm attained 66.1%which is referred to as imperceptibility.展开更多
Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English languag...Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English language in characteristics such as the number of vowels. English has more than 24 vowels that are close to each other in pronunciation. The Arabic language only has three short vowels that are far from each other in utter and measurement, by elongating those short vowels, long vowels arose. Researchers said that the vowels could be recognized using formants. The formants’ measurements of Arabic vowels are far from each other too, so it is possible to recognize them so that Arabic Speech recognition can give more accurate results. The paper applies this idea to the corpus Phonemes of Arabic. It uses the Euclidian distance method to measure the distances between formant values to recognize Arabic from words with a CV3 structure, the Linear Predictive Coding method and MATLAB to develop the programs that will extract the formants and calculate the means of the short vowels by using the corpus to identify the short vowels within words in the corpus. The results showed that if highly qualified readers were chosen to read the Arabic text, then higher rates of recognition of the short vowels involved in words will be achieved. This paper revealed that some of the characteristics of a language can be utilized for vowel recognition or to enhance the existing methods for speech recognition.展开更多
This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sen...This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sentences and their voices were recorded. A software program is used to analyze their voices. In spectrograms generated by Praat, the connection between formant values and articulation features is used to investigate how native speakers pronounce these two vowels and what the differences are between native speakers and Chinese speakers. Through this investigation, it is discovered that Chinese speakers have lower tongue position in [i] and their tongues are more forward in [I], thus making it hard to differentiate these two vowels. Moreover, the length of [i] is much shorter than those in American pronunciation, suggesting that Chinese speakers differentiate [i] and [I] largely by length. However, the comparison of Chinese speakers and native speakers proved otherwise.展开更多
In pronunciation teaching, learners may have difficulty when there is a ＂gap＂ in the phonemic system between L1 （the first or native language） and L2 （the second or foreign language）. In such a case, they tend t...In pronunciation teaching, learners may have difficulty when there is a ＂gap＂ in the phonemic system between L1 （the first or native language） and L2 （the second or foreign language）. In such a case, they tend to use their native language sounds in speaking the foreign language. Since some Chinese and English vowel sounds are easy to be confused, applying IPA cardinal vowels in the teaching of English pronunciation will help Chinese learners identify the difference between an English vowel sound and a Chinese vowel sound and thus enables them to make intelligible English speech sounds.展开更多
This paper studies the special pronunciation rules of consonants.vowels and stresses in English medical terms from the phonetic and etiologic perspectives,which may provide help for medical students in studying medica...This paper studies the special pronunciation rules of consonants.vowels and stresses in English medical terms from the phonetic and etiologic perspectives,which may provide help for medical students in studying medical English.展开更多
This paper presents a novel non-contact heart rate extraction method from vowel speech signals. The proposed method is based on modeling the relationship between speech production of vowel speech signals and heart act...This paper presents a novel non-contact heart rate extraction method from vowel speech signals. The proposed method is based on modeling the relationship between speech production of vowel speech signals and heart activities for humans where it is observed that the moment of heart beat causes a short increment （evolution） of vowel speech formants. The short-time Fourier transform （STFT） is used to detect the formant maximum peaks so as to accurately estimate the heart rate. Compared with traditional contact pulse oximeter, the average accuracy of the proposed non-contact heart rate extraction method exceeds 95%. The proposed non-contact heart rate extraction method is expected to play an important role in modern medical applications.展开更多
We propose a novel clustering algorithm using fast global kernel fuzzy c-means-F(FGKFCM-F), where F refers to kernelized feature space. This algorithm proceeds in an incremental way to derive the near-optimal solution...We propose a novel clustering algorithm using fast global kernel fuzzy c-means-F(FGKFCM-F), where F refers to kernelized feature space. This algorithm proceeds in an incremental way to derive the near-optimal solution by solving all intermediate problems using kernel-based fuzzy c-means-F(KFCM-F) as a local search procedure. Due to the incremental nature and the nonlinear properties inherited from KFCM-F, this algorithm overcomes the two shortcomings of fuzzy c-means(FCM): sen- sitivity to initialization and inability to use nonlinear separable data. An accelerating scheme is developed to reduce the compu-tational complexity without significantly affecting the solution quality. Experiments are carried out to test the proposed algorithm on a nonlinear artificial dataset and a real-world dataset of speech signals for consonant/vowel segmentation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving clustering performance on both types of datasets.展开更多
文摘The current study investigated how language context and word frequency influenced vowel perception of Chinese-Japanese cognates among Chinese learners of Japanese.Focusing on orthographic cognates,participants performed a vowel detection task on cognates,manipulating language context and target language(Chinese vs.Japanese),as well as word frequency(high vs.low).We measured reaction times,perceptual sensitivity,and response criterion.For high-frequency words,consistent language contexts facilitated faster vowel detection in both languages.However,in low-frequency conditions,participants showed higher perceptual sensitivity to Chinese targets and more conservative response criteria for Japanese targets,regardless of context.These findings revealed the complex interplay between word frequency,language dominance,and context in cross-language processing.Our study contributed to the understanding of vowel perception in languages with shared orthography but distinct phonological systems,offering insights for models of cross-language cognition and second language education.Furthermore,it highlighted the importance of considering both word frequency and language-specific features in cross-language studies.
文摘This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant (CVVC). Even though there has been a dispute on the precise number of Arabic vowels that exist between language studies, this study used the opinion that the Arabic language has three vowels;the elongation of each vowel gave the other three because this is the opinion of classical Arabic linguists which is the source of the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Studies said that the first and second formant values (F1, F2) can represent the vowels. In this study, the formants were measured using LPC (Linear Predictive Coding), verifying the measurement to see if the measured follows the pattern of formants measurements of the other studies, and the formants were used to investigate the relationship between short and long vowels. Furthermore, the study figured out if the dialect of speakers can affect the values of formants, even if the spoken language is MSA, some statistical measurements were calculated to evaluate the relationship.
文摘Korean characters consist of 2 dimensional distributed consonantal and vowel graphemes. The purpose of reducing the 2 dimensional characteristics of Korean characters to linear arrangements at early stage of character recognition is to decrease the complexity of following recognition task. By defining the identification codes for the vowel graphemes of Korean characters, the rules for combination of vowel graphemes are established, and a recognition algorithm based on the rules for combination of vowel graphemes, is therefore proposed for vertical vowel graphemes. The algorithm has been proved feasilbe through demonstrating simulations.
文摘The paper introduces the cardinal vowels system invented by the famous English phonetician Daniel Jones.This system enables a teacher to describe to his students a foreign vowel by comparing it with the nearest vowel in his mother tongue,which makes the learning of a foreign sound much easier to his students.Two cases of teaching Chinese students English vowels are taken as an example to illustrate the point.IPA cardinal vowel system is of use in terms of teaching and learning English.Two suggestions are put forward in the end.
文摘The Vowel changes of English are more dramatic and complicated in every period of English development. Especially theGreat Vowel Shift from Middle English to Modern English influenced the whole English phonetic system. This paper examines thevowel changes in each period of English development and aims at concluding the rules of the language change and development.
文摘The aim of the article is to present results of research that was performed with 97 Polish students of the second and third year of English Philology. The purpose of the research is to examine how conscious manipulation of facial expressions aids acquisition of foreign vowels by learners, regardless of their native language and the culture they have been brought up in. Taking advantage of achievements derived from such disciplines as psychology of emotions and phonetics depicted as a physical process, an attempt is made to find a tool that improves teaching/learning of foreign vowels, that is to say, an effort is put in search of a useful method to make the phonetic process faster and more accurate. Teachers of English are encouraged to put the method, which is described in detail in the paper, into practice with their own mother languages and to share opinions about the method with colleagues. Similarly, it is believed that it can be applied to courses of other languages than just English. Teachers of those languages are encouraged to try to use it, too.
文摘This paper aims at examining the perception of English tense and lax vowel contrasts by testing an identification task of CVC syllables with different manipulated durations in Chinese learners of English.This can provide some empirical evidence for English as a second language teachers in teaching second language pronunciation.
文摘This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four children(two boys and two girls all 8 years old)equally from the two dialects of EkeGusii(EkeMaate and EkeRogoro Dialects).In order to capture the distribution characteristics of the vowel acoustic concentration,the group frequency means are normalized using Lobanov’s(1971)algorithm.Two viewpoints are the subjects of analysis in EkeGusii vowels:(a)acoustic vowel space as projected by the intersection of F2 vs.F1 or quadrilateral,and(b)spatial features of high,low,front and back.These qualities are mainly influenced by the physiology of speakers and social variability as occasioned by gender,age and dialect.The results indicate that children have no gender difference in formants,and have the highest frequencies for all formants,followed by adult females and then adult males.Furthermore,acoustic vowel space and spatial features are affected by gender,age,and dialect.A vowel pattern,replicated by all informants,is realized in the dispersion of the vowels within the chart influenced by gender and age.This study found out that EkeGusii seems to adopt a seven-vowel system of/i eɛaɔo u/with a length contrast.
文摘The great gowel ghift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the 15th to 18th centuries. Based on the history and theory of great vowel shift, the thesis makes an investigation on the principle, exceptions and effect of Great Vowel Shift.
基金This work is conducted at Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics,under cyber physical systems research group and funded by MOHE(FRGS:R.K130000.7856.5F026),Received by Nilam Nur Amir Sjarif.
文摘The most sensitive Arabic text available online is the digital Holy Quran.This sacred Islamic religious book is recited by all Muslims worldwide including non-Arabs as part of their worship needs.Thus,it should be protected from any kind of tampering to keep its invaluable meaning intact.Different characteristics of Arabic letters like the vowels(),Kashida(extended letters),and other symbols in the Holy Quran must be secured from alterations.The cover text of the Quran and its watermarked text are different due to the low values of the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR)and Embedding Ratio(ER).A watermarking technique with enhanced attributes must,therefore,be designed for the Quran’s text using Arabic vowels with kashida.The gap addressed by this paper is to improve the security of Arabic text in the Holy Quran by using vowels with kashida.The purpose of this paper is to enhance the Quran text watermarking scheme based on a reversing technique.The methodology consists of four phases:The first phase is a pre-processing followed by the second phase-the embedding process phase—which will hide the data after the vowels.That is,if the secret bit is“1”,then the kashida is inserted;however,the kashida is not inserted if the bit is“0”.The third phase is the extraction process and the last phase is to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by using PSNR(for the imperceptibility)and ER(for the capacity).The experimental results show that the proposed method of imperceptibility insertion is also optimized with the help of a reversing algorithm.The proposed strategy obtains a 90.5%capacity.Furthermore,the proposed algorithm attained 66.1%which is referred to as imperceptibility.
文摘Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English language in characteristics such as the number of vowels. English has more than 24 vowels that are close to each other in pronunciation. The Arabic language only has three short vowels that are far from each other in utter and measurement, by elongating those short vowels, long vowels arose. Researchers said that the vowels could be recognized using formants. The formants’ measurements of Arabic vowels are far from each other too, so it is possible to recognize them so that Arabic Speech recognition can give more accurate results. The paper applies this idea to the corpus Phonemes of Arabic. It uses the Euclidian distance method to measure the distances between formant values to recognize Arabic from words with a CV3 structure, the Linear Predictive Coding method and MATLAB to develop the programs that will extract the formants and calculate the means of the short vowels by using the corpus to identify the short vowels within words in the corpus. The results showed that if highly qualified readers were chosen to read the Arabic text, then higher rates of recognition of the short vowels involved in words will be achieved. This paper revealed that some of the characteristics of a language can be utilized for vowel recognition or to enhance the existing methods for speech recognition.
文摘This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sentences and their voices were recorded. A software program is used to analyze their voices. In spectrograms generated by Praat, the connection between formant values and articulation features is used to investigate how native speakers pronounce these two vowels and what the differences are between native speakers and Chinese speakers. Through this investigation, it is discovered that Chinese speakers have lower tongue position in [i] and their tongues are more forward in [I], thus making it hard to differentiate these two vowels. Moreover, the length of [i] is much shorter than those in American pronunciation, suggesting that Chinese speakers differentiate [i] and [I] largely by length. However, the comparison of Chinese speakers and native speakers proved otherwise.
文摘In pronunciation teaching, learners may have difficulty when there is a ＂gap＂ in the phonemic system between L1 （the first or native language） and L2 （the second or foreign language）. In such a case, they tend to use their native language sounds in speaking the foreign language. Since some Chinese and English vowel sounds are easy to be confused, applying IPA cardinal vowels in the teaching of English pronunciation will help Chinese learners identify the difference between an English vowel sound and a Chinese vowel sound and thus enables them to make intelligible English speech sounds.
文摘This paper studies the special pronunciation rules of consonants.vowels and stresses in English medical terms from the phonetic and etiologic perspectives,which may provide help for medical students in studying medical English.
文摘This paper presents a novel non-contact heart rate extraction method from vowel speech signals. The proposed method is based on modeling the relationship between speech production of vowel speech signals and heart activities for humans where it is observed that the moment of heart beat causes a short increment （evolution） of vowel speech formants. The short-time Fourier transform （STFT） is used to detect the formant maximum peaks so as to accurately estimate the heart rate. Compared with traditional contact pulse oximeter, the average accuracy of the proposed non-contact heart rate extraction method exceeds 95%. The proposed non-contact heart rate extraction method is expected to play an important role in modern medical applications.
基金Project supported by the National Research Foundation(NRF) of Korea(Nos.2013009458 and 2013068127)
文摘We propose a novel clustering algorithm using fast global kernel fuzzy c-means-F(FGKFCM-F), where F refers to kernelized feature space. This algorithm proceeds in an incremental way to derive the near-optimal solution by solving all intermediate problems using kernel-based fuzzy c-means-F(KFCM-F) as a local search procedure. Due to the incremental nature and the nonlinear properties inherited from KFCM-F, this algorithm overcomes the two shortcomings of fuzzy c-means(FCM): sen- sitivity to initialization and inability to use nonlinear separable data. An accelerating scheme is developed to reduce the compu-tational complexity without significantly affecting the solution quality. Experiments are carried out to test the proposed algorithm on a nonlinear artificial dataset and a real-world dataset of speech signals for consonant/vowel segmentation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving clustering performance on both types of datasets.
