School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 170
-
ItemMental Simulation in L2 Processing of English Prepositional Phrases(Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY), 2023-07-14)Embodied simulation hypothesis supposes that language processing involves the activation of perceptual-motor systems to recreate the described scene (Bergen, 2012, 2019). The paper investigates whether and how adolescent second language (L2) learners’ online processing of prepositions engages mental simulation. Specifically, the study examines whether any observed mental simulation effect was modulated by prepositions, abstractness of senses, and Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA). 40 Chinese adolescents completed a diagram-picture matching task followed by a semantic priming task in English, where participants saw a diagrammatic prime and made phrasal acceptability judgement. Results showed a compatibility effect of schematic diagrams on adolescent L2 English learners’ accuracy rates (ARs) of processing prepositional phrases (PPs), while response times (RTs) results did not reveal mental simulation effects. The findings suggest that schematic diagrams could serve as effective perceptual cues to prime adolescent L2 learners’ processing of schema-compatible English PPs by improving judgement accuracy but not processing speed.
-
Item“And healthcare will be cured too”: transformations of winged phrases from Soviet films in modern Russian newspaper headings(Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile u Puli / Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia Zagrebačka 30, 52100 Pula, Hrvatska, 2022-08-29)This paper examines the usage of “winged phrases” from Soviet cinema as they make their way from their place as film quotations into modern Russian – more specifically, into newspaper headings. The focus of this study is the process of the transformation of winged phrases in article headings within three contemporary Russian newspapers: “Комсомольская правда – Москва” (Komsomolʹs Truth – Moscow), “Известия” (News) and “Литературная газета” (Literary Gazette). The paper draws on analysis of 151 newspaper headings for the period from 1st January 2017 until 1st July 2018. An interpretation of transformed winged phrases embedded into newspaper headings is presented, drawing upon Lotman’s writings on cultural semiotics. It is argued that when winged phrases travel across time and across a “semiotic border” (Lotman) they undergo transformations from Soviet films into a contemporary context while retaining a dialogic connection with the past.
-
Item
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableCustomary song in Christian clothing(Presses universitaires de la Nouvelle‐Calédonie, 2023)In this paper, we illustrate the maintenance of archaic forms of Nafsan (a language spoken in Efate, Vanuatu) in song, and take one particular song as an example. Nafsan is known for having lost medial and final vowels in everyday language, but these can be, as in many languages, retained in song. One of the very few books written in Nafsan by Nafsan speakers was produced in 1983 in Port Vila (Wai et al.). It contains twelve stories, and ends with a cryptic inscription, M‐dd‐M‐dd‐ddl‐S‐dl‐s‐dd. All the stories were transcribed and translated as part of Thieberger’s research, but he was not sure what to do with this collection of letters. By chance, a copy of a hymnal on Lelepa island had the same cryptic letters that were evidently a form of musical notation known as solfa, Tonic Sol‐fa, or Solfege. Translations of Christian hymns into Nafsan were first made in the 1840s, but none of these hymnals includes solfa notation. As Stevens (2005) notes, solfa “often resulted in the emergence of a school of indigenous composers writing in Tonic Sol-fa notation and using the tonal harmonic style”. That is clearly the case in this Nafsan story. In this paper, we will look in more detail at the Ririal song, noting its archaic content. Early translations of hymns often maintain vowels that are now lost in Nafsan, and the same appears to be the case with the Ririal song. It is indicative of the syncretism with which Christianity has been received in Efate that a method of transcription originally intended to make Christian hymns more accessible has been adapted in a monolingual set of kastom stories to present a traditional song.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableProsodic phrasing, pitch range and word order variation in Murrinhpatha(ASSTA, 2022)Like many Indigenous Australian languages, Murrinhpatha has flexible word order with no apparent configurational syntax. We analyzed an experimental corpus of Murrinhpatha utterances for associations between different thematic role orders, intonational phrasing patterns and pitch downtrends. We found that initial constituents (Agents or Patients) tend to carry the highest pitch targets (HiF0), followed by patterns of downstep and declination. Sentence-final verbs always have lower Hif0 values than either initial or medial Agents or Patients. Thematic role order does not influence intonational patterns, with the results suggesting that Murrinhpatha has positional prosody, although final nominals can disrupt global pitch downtrends regardless of thematic role.
-
ItemStop (de)gemination in Veneto Italian: The role of durational correlates.(Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, 2022-12-16)This preliminary study investigates a long-assumed but previously untested degemination of stops in the regional variety of Italian spoken in the Veneto, in North-East Italy. The durational parameters known to be affected by gemination in Italian – i.e., consonant duration, duration of the preceding vowel and the ratio between the two – are considered. The entire Italian stop series is investigated through an acoustic-phonetic production experiment involving six speakers reading a set of carrier sentences designed to elicit different prosodic patterns. Partial degemination is observed for most speakers in terms of (a) decreased geminate-singleton consonant duration differences compared to previous studies on other Italian varieties, and (b) considerable overlap between geminate and singleton consonant-to-vowel duration ratio categories. Possible sociophonetic effects are discussed.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableDesigning an App for Pregnancy Care for a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community(The Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)We report a study to design and evaluate an app to support pregnancy information provided to women through an Australian health service. As part of a larger project to provide prenatal resources for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, this study focused on the design and reception of an app with the local Vietnamese community and health professionals of a particular hospital. Our study had three stages: an initial design workshop with the hospital; prototype design and development; prototype-based interviews with health professionals and focus groups with Vietnamese women. We explore how an app of this sort must be designed for a range of different use scenarios, considering its use by consumers with a multiplicity of differing viewpoints about its nature and purpose in relation to pregnancy care.
-
ItemКрылатые выражения из советских кинофильмов как элементы национальной идентичности(Издательство "Научный консультант", 2019)The paper is dedicated to the questions of the reflection of national identity in the headlines of newspapers Komsomol'skaya Pravda – Moscow, Izvestiya and Literaturnaya Gazeta for the period from 1st January 2017 until 1st July 2018, drawing upon examples of winged words adapted from Soviet films. Specific winged phrases considered uniquely reflective of Russian culture are highlighted. An attempt is made to explain the main reasons behind winged phrases transformations. The paper stresses the value of learning winged phrases from Soviet films in practical classes of Russian taught as a foreign language.
-
ItemBuilding Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)(ISCA, 2018)Machine learning has revolutionized speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of ELPIS, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. ELPIS puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide, and speeds up language documentation. Complete automation of the process is not feasible for languages with small quantities of data and potentially large vocabularies. Hence our goal is not full automation, but rather to make a practical and effective workflow that integrates machine learning technologies.
-
ItemNasal aerodynamics and coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance(ASSTA, 2016-12-06)Nasal phonemes are well represented within the lexicon of BininjKunwok.1 Thisstudyexaminesintervocalic,wordmedial nasals and reports patterns of coarticulation using a Smooth- ing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA). This allows for detailed comparisons of peak nasal airflow across six female speakers of the language. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalisation and greater carryover into a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed for coronals when compared to the onset of oral closure in the nasal, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. The velar place of articulation is the exception to this pattern with some limited anticipatory nasalisation. The SSANOVA has shown to be an appropriate technique for quantifying these patterns and dynamic speech data in general.