This research demonstrates the need of developing relationships of collaboration and trust between archivists and living musicians. Why do this? On one hand, we do this to establish a new approach,...Show moreThis research demonstrates the need of developing relationships of collaboration and trust between archivists and living musicians. Why do this? On one hand, we do this to establish a new approach, which will allow archivists to find answers about musicians’ documentation habits and thoroughly understand why musicians create their personal records, what does personal and music archives mean to them, and how do they create, use, organize and share them. On the other hand, musicians will have the chance to see the whole picture of what a personal music archive is, how to organize, utilize, and protect it from deterioration and data loss. How will we do this? By conducting interviews and creating meaningful questionnaires archivists will build relationships of trust and confidentiality with musicians, which will bring those two communities closer and benefit both.Show less
This thesis is focussed on the pronunciation and acquisition of second language phonology. More specifically, the acquisition of Dutch vowels in native Japanese speakers. A lot of research on...Show moreThis thesis is focussed on the pronunciation and acquisition of second language phonology. More specifically, the acquisition of Dutch vowels in native Japanese speakers. A lot of research on phonology acquisition, especially with Japanese, tends to look at consonants. However, in this paper vowel acquisition is addressed. Dutch has an extensive vowel system with twelve monophthongs and three diphthongs while Japanese has only five vowels. Japanese learners of Dutch were recorded and formant analysis was used to determine which phonological processes influence the pronunciation of target language phonemes.Show less
To get hands on Dutch fricative devoicing and to find the insides of the devoicing process, it is useful to take a sharper look at child’s language acquisition. How do children acquire their...Show moreTo get hands on Dutch fricative devoicing and to find the insides of the devoicing process, it is useful to take a sharper look at child’s language acquisition. How do children acquire their fricatives in a dialect with voicing fricatives counterparts and with fricatives that nearly stand alone in their place of articulation, like the post-velar fricative? Are these fricatives acquired similarly? To answer these questions, one needs to find out first whether children make a distinction at all between fricatives, and moreover what acoustics they use to distinguish these sounds. In order to learn more about the development of fricative acquisition, an apparent time research including different age groups will be described. In this way, it can be determined whether young and old children use the same acoustic characteristics, and whether there is a development trajectory detectable in the voicing distinction. As has been known from the literature (Hermans & Van Oostendorp 2011), the occurrence of voiced and voiceless fricatives in Dutch is not only determined lexically, but it has very much to do with the phonological context as well. Do children use this context and is there a development in the use of this phonological rule? To gain insights into the above issues, this study attempts to discover how Dutch children cope with the production of the distinction between the fricative counterparts of three different places of articulation. It seems that children first learn to produce different fricatives and, unexpectedly, after a few years they change their use of the voicing counterparts of fricatives. This thesis shows the fricative phonetics of children in kindergarten and children around ten years of age, and suggests a possible explanation for their phonetics at different stages of their childhood.Show less
The processes involved in second language phonology have been long researched, yet the research is not always easy to apply in real-life teaching situations. Considering the dynamics of learning a...Show moreThe processes involved in second language phonology have been long researched, yet the research is not always easy to apply in real-life teaching situations. Considering the dynamics of learning a second language and respecting the innate processes that are involved in phonology acquisition the method of this thesis steps away from a traditional lengthy formal instruction: participants were given a very short instruction on their pronunciation. The differences before and after instruction were measured both phonetically (in F1 and F2 frequencies) and audibly (survey). One participant is successful at changing his output both phonetically and audibly, while the others are less successful. Their results, however, inform us about learners’ aptitude, the interconnectedness between vowel output and learner proficiency, transfer processes, and draws comparisons with dynamic systems theory and the effect that psychological tension may have on language output.Show less
