A Useful System in Learning and Teaching English Pronunciation——IPA Cardinal Vowels System

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.

Using Formants to Compare Short and Long Vowels in Modern Standard Arabic

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.

Payload Capacity Scheme for Quran Text Watermarking Based on Vowels with Kashida

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.

Using Formants to Extract Short Vowels from Arabic Words with (Consonant Vowel)³Structure

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.

The Emotional Approach of Foreign Vowel Acquisition Within the Example of British English Vowels

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.

Presentation of Consonants,Vowels and Stresses in English Medical Terminology

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.

IPA Cardinal Vowels and the English Pronunciation Teaching in China

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.

谈汉语拼音的字母“o”和元音“o”

本文从八个方面讨论汉语拼音中“o”的读音,以把字母“o”和元音“o”区分开来。一、制定《汉语拼音方案》有语音学原则、文字学原则和兼顾传统的做法。二、普通话基础音系没有“o”元音音位。三、汉语拼音中的字母“o”有三种不同的发音。四、中国学生的语音直觉就是“bo、duo”的韵母相同。五、教外国学生汉语拼音时要注意说明并操练字母“o”在不同条件下的实际发音。六、语文字典可以兼顾韵母“o”的读音和叹词“喔”的规范。七、可以适当编制相应的使用说明以妥善处理《汉语拼音方案》使用中的问题。八、建议完善《汉语拼音方案》,以便更好地发挥汉语拼音的作用。

大称标记的分布及其语音象似性

大称和小称这两种范畴在分布上和形式上都体现出不对称性,主要表现为:小称在人类语言中普遍存在,语音形式上倾向于使用前高元音或高调,体现出明显的语音象似性;而大称目前只发现在印欧语系、汉藏语系以及尼日尔-刚果语系中有较多的分布,语音上也没有表现出类似小称那么强的象似性。本文考察了三大语系中大称标记的语音形式,提出大称标记的语音象似性程度与大称标记本身的语法化程度有关;大称标记倾向于使用开口度大的低元音,并使得其所附着的词干的元音开口度降低。

上古前元音假说与闽语中“面”和“眠”的读音

文章指出,“面脸”和“眠”的上古音分别是*C.me[n]-s和*m■i[n]。原始闽语形式则为*mhin^(tone3)和*min^(tone1)。原始闽语的主要元音*i可以理解为上古前元音*i或*e之前高或前半高舌位的反映。

On the Vowel Changes of English Language in History

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.

Perception of English Tense and Lax Vowel Contrasts in Chinese Learners of English

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.

Preliminary Studies on Great Vowel Shift

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.

Recognition of vertical vowel graphemes of Korean characters based on combination of vowel graphemes

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.

Acoustic Analysis of EkeGusii Vowel System

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.

Differences of Vowel Pronunciation in China English and American English： A Case Study of [i] and [I]

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.

《碛砂藏》随函音义甾思韵考

《碛砂藏》的随函音义作于宋初,其中止摄开口精、庄组字改良切下字,比例超过90%(少数特殊情况除外),而且完全不作其他字的切下字,反映甾思韵已经独立。甾思韵的性质大概是舌尖元音,有?、?两个条件变体,分别出现在精、庄组声母之后。甾思韵进一步发展,则为《韵会》的赀字母韵,演变路径与《中原音韵》的支思韵不同。

嗓音障碍患者的普通话元音空间面积及其合理施测方式和语料研究

目的探究嗓音障碍患者的元音声学特征,以及普通话体系下的元音空间面积(vowel space area,VSA)合理的施测方式和语料。方法招募年龄和性别相匹配的嗓音障碍患者和正常健康对照组受试者各20例,在不同语料(单个元音/a/、/i/、/u/、/o/、/e/和长句)以及不同元音顶点个数(3个、4个、5个)下的VSA进行差异分析。结果嗓音障碍组与正常组之间在单元音和长句语料下VSA都有极显著差异,但两种语料类型间VSA差异不显著,两种语料均可用于VSA的测量。4个元音顶点与3个元音顶点及5个元音顶点下的VSA差异极显著,选择5个元音用于普通话体系下VSA的测量更加合适。结论嗓音障碍患者的元音发音较正常人清晰度下降。在普通话体系下采用5个元音顶点测量VSA相对较精准,更能测得口腔的运动能力。单个元音和连续语音两种语料均适用于VSA的测量。

普兰店方言元音格局代际差异的实验研究

本研究采用声学实验的方法,以元音格局理论为依据,通过对比老中青3个年龄段的元音格局,考察不同年龄段发音人元音格局之间的代际差异。研究发现,不同年龄段发音人的元音格局之间确实存在代际差异,且发音人年龄越小,其元音格局越接近于普通话元音格局。这一现象表明普兰店方言元音格局在这几十年来一直在不断地向着普通话元音格局转变。导致这一代际差异的原因不仅有普通话强有力的影响,还有人们对普通话和当地方言所采取的不同态度。

基于语音参数数据库的康家语短元音研究

康家语属于阿尔泰语系蒙古语族,研究康家语短元音是蒙古语族语言研究不可或缺的一部分。本文基于“康家语语音声学参数库”,采用实验语音学的理论和方法对康家语短元音进行了声学分析。实验结果表明,康家语有[B][3][i][3][u][o][u][y][e]等9个短元音音位,均出现在词首音节和非词首音节并在双音节词的CV音节中出现的频率相对高。康家语短元音声学研究对蒙古语族语言语音对比研究及探索蒙古语族语言语音演变规律提供重要资料。