Phonemic awareness in an oral German-origin Brazilian language: a study of Hunsrückisch and German bilinguals
= [Consciência fonêmica na língua brasileira de origem alemã oral: um estudo de bilíngues de Hunsrückisch e alemão]
Abstract: Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate language sounds in their base form (phonemes). It is associated with emerging literacy skills and predictive of skilled reading. The aim of the present study was to investigate...
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Abstract: Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate language sounds in their base form (phonemes). It is associated with emerging literacy skills and predictive of skilled reading. The aim of the present study was to investigate phonemic awareness in German and its association with speaking a German-origin, but predominantly unwritten language. We investigated speakers of Hunsrückisch, a Brazilian minority language predominantly used in its spoken form. Participants were literate Brazilian Portuguese speakers who spoke Hunsrückisch and German or Hunsrückisch only. The results show faster, more accurate performance in the phonemic awareness task among participants who spoke Hunsrückisch and German, relative to those who spoke Hunsrückisch only. Participants who spoke Hunsrückisch only were able to perform the phonemic awareness tasks but having learned to read and write in German allowed for faster, more accurate performance, especially in relation to pseudowords
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Drawing areal information from a corpus of noisy dialect data
Abstract: This article is an analysis of linguistic survey data representing German dialects in Switzerland in 1933/34 based on the so-called Wenker sentences. The data are impressionistic in terms of applied phonetic transcriptions, which were...
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Abstract: This article is an analysis of linguistic survey data representing German dialects in Switzerland in 1933/34 based on the so-called Wenker sentences. The data are impressionistic in terms of applied phonetic transcriptions, which were produced by non-specialists using the Latin alphabet. Due to the lack of pre-defined standardization, the phonetic transcriptions are very heterogeneous. From a technical perspective, this leads to very noisy data, which is why the validity of the Wenker data in general and the Swiss Wenker data in particular has been questioned. Using methods from computational linguistics, we compare, for the first time, Wenker data with linguistic data collected at virtually the same time by linguistics professionals. Direct comparison with a sample from the published atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) reveals that despite the noisiness of the data, they nevertheless provide reliable information, e.g., in terms of the spatial structuring of Swiss dialects. The study is thus a successful pilot for other corpus-based studies dealing with unstructured Wenker data in other regions
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Universities and vernacular preaching
the case of Vienna, Heidelberg and Basle
Observing soldier and enlightened "Huron"
: Johann Gottfried Seume's Nova Scotian experience
A neurophysiological investigation of non-native phoneme perception by Dutch and German listeners
Abstract: The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) response has often been used to measure memory traces for phonological representations and to show effects of long-term native language (L1) experience on neural organization. We know little about whether...
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Abstract: The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) response has often been used to measure memory traces for phonological representations and to show effects of long-term native language (L1) experience on neural organization. We know little about whether phonological representations of non-native (L2) phonemes are modulated by experience with distinct non-native accents. We used MMN to examine effects of experience with L2-accentedspeech on auditory brain responses. Specifically, we tested whether it is long-term experience with language-specific L2 pronunciations or instead acoustic similarity between L2 speech sounds that modulates non-native phoneme perception. We registered MMN responses of Dutch and German proficient L2 speakers of English to the English interdental fricative /θ/ and compared it to its non-native pronunciations /s/ (typical pronunciation of /θ/ for German speakers) and /t/ (typical pronunciation of /θ/ for Dutch speakers). Dutch and German listeners heard the English pseudoword thond and its pronunciation deviants sond and tond. We computed the identity Mismatch Negativity (iMMN) by analyzing the difference in ERPs when the deviants were the frequent vs. the infrequent stimulus for the respective group of L2 listeners. For both groups, tond and sond elicited mismatch effects of comparable size. Overall, the results suggest that experience with deviant pronunciations of L2 speech sounds in foreignaccented speech does not alter auditory memory traces. Instead, non-native phoneme perception seems to be modulated by acoustic similarity between speech sounds rather than by experience with typical L2 pronunciation patterns
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