Kirkpatrick claimed that French keyboard music sounded like French. Hall (1953) talked about a resemblance of Elgar’s Music and the intonation of British speech. Both discussed instrumental music...Show moreKirkpatrick claimed that French keyboard music sounded like French. Hall (1953) talked about a resemblance of Elgar’s Music and the intonation of British speech. Both discussed instrumental music and a likeness with the speech, which has remained controversial. This thesis investigates the robustness of the metrics used for the two experiments in rhythm and melody to provide information about their linguistic origins. To this end, this thesis replicates the two experiments of Patel et al. (2006) regarding the rhythm and melody of British English and French speech and instrumental music. In addition, a third parameter labelled as “slope” was tested to investigate if melody, when taking into consideration the durational property of the melodic interval, provides the same results as the two previous replicated experiments. We replicated the findings for rhythm and melody reported in Patel et al. (2006). The slope parameter, however, showed a reverse pattern raising some critical questions about the validity of the metrics to portray statistical evidence of national characteristics in speech and music.Show less
Previous studies have indicated that native and non-native listeners’ attention to differences in segments and lexical tones is heightened when language context is removed. Do they also display...Show morePrevious studies have indicated that native and non-native listeners’ attention to differences in segments and lexical tones is heightened when language context is removed. Do they also display greater sensitivity to intonational differences in the absence of language context? To examine this question, this thesis tests the ability of Dutch and Mandarin listeners to identify Mandarin questions and statements that differ only in intonation in three different levels of language context: no language context, a neutral language context, and a constraining language context. All listeners were found to identify questions and statements better with each increasing level of language context. This suggests that the presence of a meaningful semantic context facilitates the perception of intonational meaning. Moreover, Mandarin listeners were better at identifying questions and statements than non-native listeners in sentences with language context. But the difference between Mandarin and Dutch listeners’ abilities was minimal in sentences without language context. This result suggests that the effect of language experience on intonation perception is diminished at the lower auditory processing level.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
