Matching Items (5)
Description
This study is about Thai English (ThaiE), a variety of World Englishes that is presently spoken in Thailand, as the result of the spread of English and the recent Thai government policies towards English communication in Thailand. In the study, I examined the linguistic data of spoken ThaiE, collected from multiple sources both in the U.S.A. and Thailand. The study made use of a qualitative approach in examining the data, which were from (i) English interviews and questionnaires with 12 highly educated Thai speakers of English during my fieldwork in the Southwestern U.S.A., Central Thailand, and Northeastern Thailand, (ii) English speech samples from the media in Thailand, i.e. television programs, a news report, and a talk radio program, and (iii) the research articles on English used by Thai speakers of English. This study describes the typology of ThaiE in terms of its morpho-syntax, phonology, and sociolinguistics, with the main focus being placed on the structural characteristics of ThaiE. Based on the data, the results show that some of the ThaiE features are similar to the World Englishes features, but some are unique to ThaiE. Therefore, I argue that ThaiE is structurally considered a new variety of World Englishes at the present time. The findings also showed an interesting result, regarding the notion of ThaiE by the fieldwork interview participants. The majority of these participants (n=6) denied the existence of ThaiE, while the minority of the participants (n=5) believed ThaiE existed, and one participant was reluctant to give the answer. The study suggested that the participants' academic backgrounds, the unfamiliar notion of ThaiE, and the level of the participants' social interaction with everyday persons may have influenced their answers to the main research question.
ContributorsRogers, Uthairat (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Mailhammer, Robert (Committee member) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The speech of non-native (L2) speakers of a language contains phonological rules that differentiate them from native speakers. These phonological rules characterize or distinguish accents in an L2. The Shibboleth program creates combinatorial rule-sets to describe the phonological pattern of these accents and classifies L2 speakers into their native language. The training and classification is done in Shibboleth by support vector machines using a Gaussian radial basis kernel. In one experiment run using Shibboleth, the program correctly identified the native language (L1) of a speaker of unknown origin 42% of the time when there were six possible L1s in which to classify the speaker. This rate is significantly better than the 17% chance classification rate. Chi-squared test (1, N=24) =10.800, p=.0010 In a second experiment, Shibboleth was not able to determine the native language family of a speaker of unknown origin at a rate better than chance (33-44%) when the L1 was not in the transcripts used for training the language family rule-set. Chi-squared test (1, N=18) =1.000, p=.3173 The 318 participants for both experiments were from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger, 2013), and ranged in age from 17 to 80 years old. Forty percent of the speakers were female and 60% were male. The factor that most influenced correct classification was higher age of onset for the L2. A higher number of years spent living in an English-speaking country did not have the expected positive effect on classification.
ContributorsFrost, Wende (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Perzanowski, Dennis (Committee member) / Gee, Elisabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation investigates the precise degree to which prosody and syntax are related. One possibility is that the syntax-prosody mapping is one-to-one (“isomorphic”) at an underlying level (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Selkirk 1996, 2011, Ito & Mester 2009). This predicts that prosodic units should preferably match up with syntactic units. It is also possible that the mapping between these systems is entirely non-isomorphic, with prosody being influenced by factors from language perception and production (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, Lahiri & Plank 2010). In this work, I argue that both perspectives are needed in order to address the full range of phonological phenomena that have been identified in English and related languages, including word-initial lenition/flapping, word-initial segment-deletion, and vowel reduction in function words, as well as patterns of pitch accent assignment, final-pronoun constructions, and the distribution of null complementizer allomorphs. In the process, I develop models for both isomorphic and non-isomorphic phrasing. The former is cast within a Minimalist syntactic framework of Merge/Label and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 2013, 2015), while the latter is characterized by a stress-based algorithm for the formation of phonological domains, following Lahiri & Plank (2010).
ContributorsKruger, William Wriley (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Carnie, Andrew (Committee member) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This thesis investigated the impact of word complexity as measured through the Proportion of Whole Word Proximity (PWP; Ingram 2002) on consonant correctness as measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1980) on the spoken words of monolingual Spanish-speaking children. The effect of word complexity on consonant correctness has previously been studied on English-speaking children (Knodel 2012); the present study extends this line of research to determine if it can be appropriately applied to Spanish. Language samples from a previous study were used (Hase, 2010) in which Spanish-speaking children were given two articulation assessments: Evaluación fonológica del habla infantil (FON; Bosch Galceran, 2004), and the Spanish Test of Articulation for Children Under Three Years of Age (STAR; Bunta, 2002). It was hypothesized that word complexity would affect a Spanish-speaking child’s productions of correct consonants as was seen for the English- speaking children studied. This hypothesis was supported for 10 out of the 14 children. The pattern of word complexity found for Spanish was as follows: CVCV > CVCVC, Tri-syllables no clusters > Disyllable words with clusters.
ContributorsPurinton, Kaitlyn Lisa (Author) / Ingram, David (Thesis director) / Dixon, Dixon (Committee member) / Barlow, Jessica (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
This thesis investigates similarities in the diachronic sound changes found in Eastern Old Japanese dialects and in Ryukyuan languages and tests a hypothesis of language contact. I examine three sound changes attested in the Eastern Old Japanese corpus of Kupchik (2011). These three are denasalization of prenasalized obstruents, the fortition of the labial glide [w] and prenasalized / simple voiced fricative [(n)z], and the irregular raising of Eastern Old Japanese mid vowels. Extralinguistic and linguistic evidence is presented in support of a hypothesis for language contact between 8th century Ryukyuan speakers and Eastern Old Japanese speakers. At present, many assumptions bog down any potential evidence of contact. However, cases where reconstructed Ryukyuan could have donated a form into EOJ do exist. With future research into early Ryukyuan development and the lexicons, phonologies, and syntactic patterns of Ryukyuan languages, more can be said about this hypothesis. Alongside testing a hypothesis of language contact, this thesis can also be viewed as an analysis of Eastern Old Japanese spelling variation of the three changes mentioned above.
ContributorsMakiyama, Alexander Koji (Author) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Gelderen, Elly van (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015