PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

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Chapter 6. Other Potential Applications 151 Eklund and Lindström (2001) conclude that there is a clear correlation between increasing educational level and closer approximation of the foreign language pronunciation. A high educational standard of subjects correlates with a high degree of xeno- phone inclusions. On the other hand, Ljung (1998) 1 reports negative attitudes towards foreign expressions correlating with a high level of education. Lindström and Eklund (2002) argue that this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that Ljung (1998) bases his observations on subjects who understood the purpose of the experiment. When be- ing asked explicitly to read a sentence containing foreign inclusions, highly educated people may make a conscious decision to preserve their native tongue from foreign influence and adapt the inclusion’s pronunciation to patterns of their own language. The same highly educated subjects might be more prone to render foreign inclusions according to the source language when unaware of the scenario. Lindström and Eklund (2000) also infer from their findings that a Swedish TTS system must be capable of producing the appropriate pronunciation of foreign names and words in running Swedish texts, as users would have difficulties in accepting a TTS system with a lower level of competence than their own. Does this mean that Swedish listeners would prefer a TTS system which at least produces those foreign speech sounds correctly that are not included in the phonological inventory of their native language? How would they react to a system that pronounces all foreign speech sounds, including those with similar counterparts in the speaker’s language, authenti- cally according to the phonetic and acoustic characteristics of the foreign language? Would highly educated people more easily accept such synthesised speech? How would listeners perceive a system that adjusts all foreign speech sounds to sounds in their native language? Provided that this type of synthesis output is intelligible, would less highly educated listeners find it easier to accept it? Only a controlled and de- tailed perception study in terms of naturalness, intelligibility, pleasantness etc. would assist in evaluating the benefit of adding certain xenophones into the inventory of a TTS system. Lindström and Eklund (2000) do hypothesise that a low inclusion level of xenophones may not appear primarily in the intelligibility dimension, but portray itself to the listener as a synthesiser with a low level of education. On the other hand, if too many xenophones are added, some users might be at a disadvantage, particularly with regards to non-English foreign inclusions. 1 Quoted in Lindström and Eklund (2002)
Chapter 6. Other Potential Applications 152 The pronunciation of English inclusions occurring in another language has also been studied by Abresch (2007). She conducted two extensive production experiments to test the extent to which English xenophones are nativised by German native speakers in German and English contexts as well as a perception study to test the conclusions drawn from the production study. 40 subjects (22 female and 18 male) aged 16 to 82 and with various educational backgrounds and English language skills participated in the first production experiment. They were asked to read German sentences with embedded anglicisms or English proper names containing English xenophones (including consonants, vowels and diphthongs). The carrier sentences containing the anglicisms and English names were selected from the online corpus Deutscher Wortschatz. 2 The majority of anglicisms were first documented in the latter half of the last century. One selection criterion was that they should not be considerably integrated into Ger- man so as to allow a potential English pronunciation. Abresch also included pseudo- anglicisms in her sample. The results of this study show that there is a great variability in the realisations (℄℄ of English xenophones by German speakers. While 62.4% of xenophones were substituted by German phones, 37.6% of them were articulated like the original English phone either with a British or an American rendering. English diphtongs and consonants (Í℄ÓÖÓÍ℄Á℄Ì℄℄℄ÒÓÒ×ØÔÓ×ØÓÒ℄Û℄×℄×Ô℄Ò×Ø℄) tended to be pronounced correctly with the exception of voiced obstruents ℄Þ℄℄Þ℄ÒÚ℄ÐÐÒÓÔÓ×ØÓÒ) and the velarised℄. They and English vowels (℄℄℄℄Á℄Í℄℄Ò℄)tended to be substituted by German phones. The extent of this substitution process is highly influenced by the age and English language skills of the subjects. Older subjects and those who are less skilled in English substituted on average more English phones. Moreover, xenophones in proper names tended to be less often substituted and more often rendered like the original. However, gender was not found to have an effect on the pronunciation of En- glish xenophones. These findings are similar to those made by Eklund and Lindström (2001), when reading English words embedded within German sentences, many Ger- man speakers substitute some English xenophones by German phones but add others to their phone inventory. While age and educational standard are influencing factors in this process, gender does not play a role. 2 http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de
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Automatic Detection of English Incl
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these parsers with the annotation-f
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Declaration I declare that this the
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3.3.5 Post-processing Module . . .
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A.2.2 Kappa Coefficient . . . . . .
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5.6 Average relative token frequenc
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3.16 Most frequent English inclusio
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Chapter 1. Introduction 2 siderable
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Bibliography 202 Damashek, M. (1995
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Bibliography 204 Finkel, J., Dingar
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Bibliography 206 Hachey, B., Alex,
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Bibliography 214 Sokol, D. K. (2000
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Bibliography 216 Yang, W. (1990). A
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PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

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